She came into the kitchen at seven the following morning. She had done it twice before in twenty-eight days, on the first two mornings, and not once since. The tray had gone up at seven every day for nine years and had gone up at seven yesterday. Ji-won put down the plate she was holding and picked it up again, which was what she had done the first time. Mrs Seo said good morning without turning round and went on with the eggs, and the whole kitchen understood that this was not a woman who had come down for breakfast. She had come down because there was an answer waiting and she was not going to take delivery of it in her own study, where she would have been sitting and he would have been standing. Georgij got up. "Yes, Mistress." Annie stopped with the cup halfway off its hook. "That's all of it?" "That's all of it." "You haven't asked me for anything." "No." "Everybody asks for something." She took the cup down. "The four before me asked for things and they had a great deal less to lose than you do." "I know what I'd be asking for," said Georgij, "and I know what it would cost you to give it, and I'd rather find out what you do when nobody has put a price on the table." He said it entirely pleasantly, and sat back down at the end of the long table, and Mrs Seo put a plate in front of him. Annie did not sit. She stood at the window with her coffee for slightly longer than she needed to, and then she took the cup with her and went, which she had not done either of the other two times. She did not like it. He watched her not like it, from the far end of the long table, over eggs, and found that he could not tell whether that was a good outcome or a bad one, and decided he was content to find out. * * * Jang had left him four registration plates and had declined, correctly, to telephone a hire company in Mapo. Georgij did not telephone the hire company either. He went at it from the other end, which took him a day and a half and consisted almost entirely of being polite to people whose job nobody respects. A private hire vehicle that sits in a hotel ramp for three hours and forty minutes has not been flagged down in the street. It has been booked, and booked for a block, and a block booking is placed on an account, and an account generates a docket, and a docket goes to the hotel because the hotel charges the ramp by the hour to anybody who is not a guest. The hotel's ramp is run by a facilities company. The facilities company has a supervisor. The supervisor has an office the size of a wardrobe under the north stair, and a laminated list of account numbers taped to the wall beside his kettle, because the system that was supposed to replace the laminated list has never worked. Georgij spent forty minutes talking to that man about his son's military service. He came away with an account number, and the name of the company holding it, and the four other evenings in the last fourteen months on which the same account had booked the same category of vehicle for a block. * * * The company was a corporate services provider in Jung-gu with six employees and no website worth the name. That was the end of it. He knew what that sort of company was for. It exists so that other companies do not have to appear on dockets, and behind it there would be another one, and behind that a third, and somewhere at the end of it a person he was not going to reach through a laminated list. The four dates were another matter. Three of them meant nothing to him at all. A Thursday in June. A Wednesday in September. A Monday last month. The fourth one he did not have to look up. It was the night a woman at the back of a room three floors under an empty shopping complex in Gangnam had raised her hand and said two-twenty. * * * He sat with that for a while. The car had waited outside the hotel for three hours and forty minutes with nobody in the back of it and had picked nobody up. Whoever it belonged to had not gone in. On the fourth date, whoever it belonged to had presumably also not gone in, because a man who will not go into a ballroom does not go down into a basement either. So there was somebody who waited outside. That was the whole of it, and it was not very much. He had a company that existed in order not to be a name. He had four dates, and three of them were a Thursday in June, a Wednesday in September and a Monday last month, and they meant nothing whatsoever to him and probably meant a great deal to somebody. He went down and gave Jang the account number, and the company, and all four of the dates, and thanked him for the plates. He did not take any of it to Annie. There was nothing there to take. He had told her in the car that he would not hand her things that merely fitted, and this was a parked car and a shell company, and a man who walks into that study with a shape and calls it a finding does it once and is never listened to properly again. He wrote the three unusable dates on the inside cover of the file instead. Three dates are three evenings, and three evenings happened somewhere, and at some point he was going to be sitting at a table with people who had been alive on all three of them. * * * Six working days after the gala, the paper had got him as far as paper goes. Nine institutions in the syndicate. Three of them large enough to have needed an internal approval, and an internal approval has a name at the bottom of it, and not one of those three publishes the name. Two were ordinary houses. The third was a fund whose beneficial ownership ran into a chain of law firms in Singapore and stopped there, and behind Singapore, according to a filing made for an entirely different purpose in 2021, was a private equity company registered in Hong Kong. So he had, on the Thursday evening, a company behind a chain behind a fund. He had no person at all, and he had known since the second day that he was not going to get one this way, and that was the third time in four weeks that the same wall had come up in front of him. * * * The restaurant was in Seongbuk-dong and had eight tables and no sign on the outside, and Chairman Woo had been going there since 1991. "Sit," he said. "You'll have the soup. It's the only thing here that isn't trying." "Then I'll have the soup." "My doctor would tell you that everything on this table is going to kill me." "Is he wrong?" "He is not wrong. He is simply not the one eating it." Chairman Woo tucked his napkin into his collar, which no man of that fortune has done in public in forty years, and was entirely happy. "Now. You wanted the whole thing from before the harbour board." "From the beginning. And I'd like to be boring about it, Chairman, so please don't spare me the parts you think are dull." "Everybody wants the ten months." "Everybody wants the ten months because it's the part with a number in it," said Georgij. "I want the two years before them." * * * It took an hour and ten minutes and he did not have to steer it once. Woo had bought the ground in a year when nobody wanted it, on the advice of a man who was now dead. Then he had sat on it through two administrations, one currency scare, and about eight months during which his own board had tried twice to make him sell it. He named both of the board members. He named the year. He described a meeting in 2016 in which somebody had said something to him about his father that he had not forgiven and was clearly never going to. He talked about concrete for nine minutes and it was the best nine minutes of the evening, and Georgij, who had no use for any of it, listened to all of it properly, because there was no version of the evening in which he pretended to. Then the money. "You couldn't fund it," said Georgij. "I could fund it. I could not fund it and also sleep." Woo pushed his bowl away. "Eighty per cent I could carry. The last twenty was going to have to come from somewhere that wasn't a bank, because the banks in that year would lend you eighty and not one won more, and they were all correct to." "And it took how long to find?" "Fourteen months of nothing. Then six weeks." There it was. * * * Georgij did not change anything at all. He did not lean forward. He did not put his glass down. He asked the next question in exactly the tone he had used for the concrete, which is the whole of the art and takes about twenty years to learn. "Six weeks is very fast after fourteen months of nothing." "It always is. That's how you know it was never about the money." "Then what was it about?" "Somebody deciding you're worth the trouble." Woo shrugged. "After that it's paperwork." "Who came to the room?" "Hm?" "When it turned. When the fourteen months became six weeks. Somebody sat down with you." Georgij turned his hand over. "That's the part I actually want, Chairman, and it's the part nobody ever writes down. Who was in the room." Chairman Woo looked at him for a moment. Then he laughed, and it was not a warm laugh, and it was the first thing all evening that had not been. "You're still on this." "I am." "I told you on Saturday I wasn't going to tell you." "You did, and I didn't ask you again on Saturday, and I've thought about very little else since." Georgij said it without any pressure anywhere in it. "I'm asking you now because we are two men eating soup and not two men in a ballroom, and because you can tell me to stop and I will stop and we can talk about concrete for another hour and I will enjoy it." The old man sat back. "Why do you want it?" "Because you built something in ten months and you are proud of it and you should be, and I cannot work out why the man who made that possible has never once been photographed standing next to you." A small pause. "That is either modesty or it is not, and I have been in this business a very short time and I already know how rare modesty is." Woo said nothing for a while. Somebody at the next table laughed at something. "There were three of them in the room," he said. "Two were lawyers and I have forgotten both of their names on purpose. The third one did the talking and he was about fifty and he had a Hong Kong accent when he spoke English and none at all when he spoke Korean." "Did he give you a card?" "He did not give anybody a card. He was not that sort." Woo turned the spoon over. "He asked me one question and I have never forgotten it, because nobody had ever asked it and everybody should. He asked me what would happen to the terminal if I died on the Tuesday." "And you told him." "I told him it would be sold within a year and split three ways and probably one of the three would be Sang-hoon. And he said yes, and then he lent me the money." Woo looked up. "That is the entire conversation, and it is the only conversation about that terminal I have ever repeated to anybody, and I am now going to eat and you are going to let me." "Thank you, Chairman." "Don't thank me. I have not given you a name." "No," said Georgij. "You've given me a question." Woo looked up. "A name I could have had wrong. Names are written down by people who were not there." He said it evenly. "A man who sits down opposite a stranger and asks him what happens to his business if he dies on the Tuesday has asked that before, and will ask it again, and every single person he has asked will remember it for the rest of their lives." A small courteous gesture. "Nobody forgets being asked that. All I have to do now is find somebody else who has been." "That's a strange way to look for a man." "It's the only way left. I've spent six days looking for him in filings." Georgij turned his glass a quarter turn. "The filings end in Singapore, and behind Singapore there is a company in Hong Kong, and behind the company in Hong Kong there is nothing whatsoever, because that is what it is for." Chairman Woo did not react to Hong Kong. He did not react to it so completely, and so briefly, and with such perfect timing, that Georgij understood he had just been given a second thing and that the old man had not intended to give him either. * * * They ate. At some point Woo told a story about a shipping agent in Busan in 1994 that was very funny, and Georgij laughed properly at it, which was not work. At some point after that, over something with a great deal of salt in it, Georgij said: "May I ask you something that isn't about you." "You may ask." "If a family in your line of business had customs in a building for six days, and it was not an inspection, what would you do?" Chairman Woo put his chopsticks down. "Whose building?" "I didn't say." "You didn't have to. There were nine of them at that dinner and every single person in that room counted." He was not laughing now. "I would do nothing at all, and I would do it very visibly, and I would make certain that everybody could see me doing nothing. Which is what they did. They came, they brought the children, they laughed at the speeches." "And after that?" "After that it depends entirely on whether the thing in the container was theirs." The room went on being a room. Georgij, who had not said the word container and had not been going to, kept his face precisely where it had been. "And if it wasn't theirs?" "Then somebody has gone to a very great deal of trouble," said Chairman Woo, "and the interesting question is not who put it there. The interesting question is who is going to be standing there with an open hand in about six weeks, offering to make it all go away." He picked his chopsticks back up. "I have been in this trade for fifty-one years," he said. "It is always the man with the open hand." * * * Georgij went out into the street at twenty past eleven with a great deal more than he had come in with, and did not feel particularly good about any of it. He had a man of about fifty who spoke English with a Hong Kong accent and Korean with none, who carried no cards, and who asked people what would happen to the thing they had built if they died on a Tuesday. He had a fund that ran into Singapore and came out in Hong Kong, and an old man who had not blinked at the word. He had a corporate services company with six employees, and somebody who waits outside buildings, and three dates that were still worth nothing at all. And he had a chairman who had just described the shape of the next six weeks without being asked, and who had done it because he liked him. The car was waiting at the top of the lane. Georgij stood on the pavement in the cold for a moment. At some point in the next month he was going to need Chairman Woo to do something expensive. He already knew which four minutes of this evening he would use to get it.

The man with the open hand