Day Twenty-Three He was in the kitchen at seven, in the clothes that had been left outside his door on the first morning, and nobody said anything about the night before. Mrs Seo put a plate in front of him and took the tray up at four minutes past, the way she had for nine years. Ji-won came in at ten past and said good morning and then said, in the manner of somebody who has spent an hour deciding whether to, that she had seen a photograph. "Where?" "On my telephone. It was in the news part." She put the cutlery down and picked it up again. "You were going in. With ma'am." "Was it a good photograph?" "You looked very serious." "That's the collar," said Georgij, and Ji-won laughed before she had decided whether she was allowed to, and then went and did the flowers. Mr Yeo came in at twenty past for his coffee, looked at Georgij's throat for slightly too long, and took the coffee outside. Eun-ju arrived at eight and had clearly also seen the photograph, and did not mention it once in six hours, which Georgij found considerably more interesting than if she had. * * * Jang came up from the security office at nine with two sheets of paper. "Your evening," he said, and put them down. "Mine, not yours. I'd rather you had it." Georgij read it. Two of Jang's men on the cars. One inside the building who had not gone within forty metres of Georgij all night, exactly as agreed. The times in and out. A note that the hotel's own people had been competent and unhurried, which from Jang was extravagant praise. At the bottom, in smaller writing, a list of four vehicles that had been in the ramp area for longer than made sense, with plates. "Three of those are drivers waiting," said Jang. "The fourth is a private hire that sat there from eight to eleven forty with nobody in the back of it and did not pick anybody up." "Did you photograph it?" "I photographed all four. It's a hire company in Mapo. I have not telephoned them and I am not going to, because a hire company in Mapo would have passed on the caller's name within an hour." Georgij looked at him. "Mr Jang." "I know." "No, you don't. I am about to say something that will annoy you." "Say it." "That is a better piece of work than anything I did between seven and midnight," said Georgij, "and I was working the entire time." Jang collected his two sheets, and squared them, and did not look particularly pleased, because a man of that sort never does. "I'll leave you the plates," he said, and went back downstairs. * * * Annie did not send for him. Not on the twenty-third and not on the twenty-fourth. He saw her twice, once in the hall and once from a window, and on both occasions she nodded and went on. So he worked. The syndicate on Woo's terminal turned out to be nine institutions, which meant nine sets of filings, and by the second evening he had reduced the nine to three that had taken a position large enough to require an internal approval, and an approval requires a name at the bottom. It was slow and it was extremely dull and it was exactly the kind of work he had been doing since he was seventeen. He did not enjoy it. He had noticed at the auction, and again in the ballroom, that he was becoming a man who preferred rooms to documents, and he did not think that was a good thing to be becoming. * * * Day Twenty-Five The telephone rang at twenty past four in the afternoon. Georgij looked at the number for two seconds, which is a very long time to look at a number, and then answered it. "Yes?" "Mr Kang Ji-hoon, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport." As though they had not stood eight feet apart for four minutes. "We met." "We did. Thank you for finding me." "It took my office six minutes." A small pause, into which Georgij was expected to say something and did not. "I hope you don't mind." "You told me you had a ministry." Kang laughed, the same short one, over in a moment. "I am going to ask you something and it is going to sound like a test, and I would like you to know in advance that it isn't one." "Then it's a test," said Georgij pleasantly, "and you and I can both live with that. Go on." "There has been some interest in a change of designation on the eastern side at Incheon. Port land. It would be a fairly technical thing." Kang's voice did not go anywhere at all. "What is your side's position on it?" * * * There it was, on a Tuesday afternoon, four days after he had walked across a room and shown a man exactly where to put it. He could not say I don't know, because he did know four fragments and I don't know was not true. He could not say we have no position, because he had no idea whether that was true and would have been guessing. He could not deflect, because Kang was listening for a deflection and would have heard it in the shape of the breath. And he could not lie. "I have no position," said Georgij. "That isn't what I asked." "I know. It's what I have." He let it be as plain as it was. "Land is the subject I told you I was empty on, four nights ago, standing at a bar. I have not become full since. Whatever my side's position is, I would be inventing it for you, and I'd rather be useless to you than inventive." There was a silence on the line that went on slightly too long. "That is a much better answer than the one I expected," said Kang. "It's the only one I have." "You could have said you'd find out and come back to me. That's what everybody says." "Then you'd have had two conversations with me instead of one, and the second one would have been worse." Another pause. "May I say something," said Kang, "and you can take it as rudeness if you like." "Please." "On Saturday you asked me for guidance. Chairman Woo has told several people that you asked him the same thing, in almost the same words, some minutes earlier." The voice remained entirely pleasant. "I found that interesting for four days and I have decided to tell you that I found it interesting, rather than to go on finding it interesting quietly." Georgij closed his eyes for a moment, in a room where nobody could see him do it. "That's fair." "Is it a technique?" "It's a habit and it's a new one." He said it lightly, and every word of it was true. "I am standing in rooms full of men who have been doing this since before I could read, and I would be a fool not to ask them things. I asked two of them in one evening and it did not occur to me until afterwards that they might compare notes." A small pause. "I'll be more careful. Not because it wasn't sincere. Because it looked like something." "Yes," said Kang Ji-hoon. "It did." "Thank you for telling me." "You'll want to read up on port designations." "I've started." "Then read the 2019 amendment first, and don't read the guidance notes, because the guidance notes were written by somebody in my building who has never seen a port." Kang sounded almost warm. "Good afternoon." The line went dead. Georgij sat with the telephone in his hand for a while. He had come out of it about as well as it could have gone. He had not lied once, and he had been handed a piece of genuine help at the end of it. He had also given something away, and it took him a further ten minutes to work out what. He had not told Kang his side's position, because he did not have it. What he had told him, in his own voice, twice, was that Annie's adviser had not been briefed on Incheon. That was the useful sentence. Kang could take it to his minister on any Tuesday of the year, and it had two readings and both of them were worth something. Either that side was keeping it away from a man they had bought expensively, in which case it mattered. Or there was nothing there at all, in which case a great deal of somebody's caution had been wasted. Georgij did not know which of those two Kang would carry, and he could not correct either without inventing. He also did not know whether the line had been recorded. He assumed it had, which cost nothing, and which he had assumed from the second the number came up. * * * Day Twenty-Six She sent for him at eight in the evening, which she had never done. The study had one lamp on, and the machine under the window was off, and there was nothing on the desk at all, which in that room meant she had cleared it before he came in. "Sit down." He sat down. "I've had the name for nineteen days," said Annie. "You worked that out in the car and you were right, and I've spent four of those days deciding what to do about the fact that you were right." "Yes, Mistress." "I'm still not going to give it to you." "I didn't think you would." "In the car you asked me why because I told you to ask. Ask because you want to know." "Why not?" "Because if I say it, you will spend the next two weeks deciding how to behave in a room, and you will get it exactly right, and getting it exactly right is the one thing that would tell him what you are." She had her hands flat on the desk. "You are better when you don't know. That is not a compliment and I would rather it were not true." Georgij did not say anything. "Now the other part," said Annie. * * * "There is a man I need in a room with me. He does not go to rooms. He has not stood in one with more than six people in it for as long as I have known he exists, and there are two people in this city who could describe his face." "And you know what he wants." "I know exactly what he wants," said Annie, "and I have exactly one of it in this house." The lamp hummed. Georgij sat with his hands loose on his knees and did not move at all, and worked it through twice, and it came out the same way both times. "You want him to look at me." "Yes." "With the collar." "With the collar," said Annie. "Not shown. Not announced. Found." She said it in the flattest voice she had used in twenty-six days. "He would have to be the one who worked it out, and he would have to believe he had worked it out against me, or it's worth nothing." "And then he comes to the room." "Then he comes to the room." Georgij looked at the desk for a moment. "May I ask what I would be for, in that room?" "You would be the reason he was in it." "That isn't what I asked." "No," said Annie. "It isn't." * * * She let that stand there for a while, and did not soften it, and did not take it back, and did not explain it. "You can refuse," she said. "I want to be clear about that before you answer, and I would rather say it than have you work out afterwards that you could have. If you say no tonight I will find another way in and it will be slower and worse and I will not raise it again." "And if I say yes?" "Then I will not tell you his name, or the date, or what he has done, and you will walk into a room having been told less than anybody in it." Annie's face did not move anywhere. "You would be doing it on my word." "That's the whole of the contract." "Yes," said Annie. "It is." Georgij was quiet for a long moment. He was aware, sitting in that chair, that he had spent twenty-six days building an instrument out of paper and rooms and other people's mouths. He was being asked to put the whole of it down on a table and be an object again, on purpose, for a man whose face two people in this city had seen. He was also aware that she had told him he could refuse, in advance, in a room with no witnesses, and that nobody had ever done that before. "I'd like to sleep on it," he said. "Yes." "Not because I'm going to say no." "I know why," said Annie. * * * He stood up. At the door he stopped, and turned round, and asked the only thing he had left. "Is it a man who was in the room when you bought me?" Annie looked at him across the desk for what felt like a considerable time. "No," she said. And it was true, and both of them knew it was true, and Georgij went up the stairs understanding perfectly well that it was also the most carefully constructed sentence he had heard since the auctioneer said the word unverifiable.