Day Forty-One · Thursday 13 November Hana came at seven and did not bring anybody with her. She stopped in the hall for a moment beside the stone shelf with the shallow bowl on it, the way people do in a house they have been in before, and then she looked at Georgij and said: "You didn't do what I told you to do." "No." "And you're not going to apologise for it." "No." "Good," said Hana, and gave him her coat. * * * They ate in the small room off the long one. Mrs Seo had laid it for three without being told how to lay it for three. Mr Baek sent up something with a great deal of salt in it, which Georgij suspected was aimed at somebody other than him. They talked about nothing at all until the plates went. Then Annie put both hands on the table. "Everything," she said. "In whatever order it comes." * * * He gave them the room first, because the room was what they did not have. The Kims first, with names on the faces, because that was the piece that had been missing since the gala. Kim Ye-rin, fifty-four, no seat and no signature and no title, and in sixteen frames out of twenty-three standing where she could see the doors. "I can show you why I think it. I cannot prove one word of it," he said. "There are seventeen frames in which somebody says something and looks at her in the middle of the sentence before going on. Two different people, four years apart, neither of them aware they are doing it." He turned his hand over. "None of that proves anything, and it is all I have." Hana laughed out loud. "Ye-rin. Of course it is Ye-rin." She was delighted in a way that was not about Georgij. "Her brother has the title. She has the family." "Then tell me the part I can't see." "She holds one point four per cent." Hana said it flatly, the way you read out a bus number. "Her brother has eleven. Two cousins have nine and seven, a sister-in-law has six, and there are two nephews with four each, and nobody at that end has the faintest idea what a berth is worth." "Forty-one across six people." "Forty-one. Forty-two point four with hers, and not one of those six has voted against her since 2009." She turned her glass. "She does the family money. She has done it since the father died. Every one of them has been carried by her at some point, and none of them can read a set of accounts, and every single one of them telephones her before they sign anything at all." "So she never has to sign." "In twenty years nobody has been able to make that woman sign anything," said Hana, "because she has never once needed to. She tells other people what to sign." "Then she is the one I have to be in a room with." "She is the only one. She will not come to a room, and I have tried." "Could you get me into one?" Hana put her glass down. "Yes," she said. "Not quickly and not twice. Once." "Then I'd like to know what it costs." "You are asking me at the table." "Asking at the table costs us both less than my finding it out in March." Hana looked at Annie. Annie gave her nothing at all to work with, and after a moment Hana turned back. "I own warehouse space at Incheon. Sixteen thousand square metres on the eastern side, in my own name, bought over eleven years." She said it in exactly the voice she had used about the ceiling at the Grand Hotel. "All of its value sits on the designation, and I spent last year getting the designation." "Yes," said Georgij. Hana stopped. "You knew." "Since Tuesday." He put his hands flat on the cloth. "I have been reading the eastern parcel for a fortnight because Incheon is the whole of this, and the first thing you do with a parcel is find out who owns it. There are forty-one holdings on that side. Yours is the fourth largest and it stands in your own name, which nobody does while they are hiding something." "And you have sat on it since Tuesday." "A name on a plot tells you nothing about what somebody means to do with it. You could have owned it since 2013 and thought about it twice a year." He turned his hand over. "So I put it with the other things I cannot read yet, and I waited to see whether you would say it at this table." "And if I hadn't?" "Then I would have asked you at this table, in front of her, in about ten minutes." Annie put her glass down. "Two days," she said. "The study is at the end of a corridor you walk along four times a day." "Yes, Mistress." "So say why you didn't." "Because a piece of land with no explanation attached is worth less to you than the same piece of land with her explanation attached. I could not have the second one without waiting for it." He did not look away from either of them. "And because on Tuesday all I had was a name in a register. I have told you twice that I would not bring you a thing that merely fits, and on Tuesday that was the whole of what it was." "You have." Annie did not tell him he had read it wrongly, and did not tell him he had read it correctly either. * * * "Something closed while you were talking that has been open for three weeks," said Georgij. "I will say it now, before we go on." "Go on." "On the terrace at the Grand Hotel you told a minister that the approach on the eastern parcel was a discourtesy rather than a threat." He said it plainly. "Nobody is insulted on somebody else's behalf. A man is insulted by a price when the price was offered to him." Hana looked at him for a moment. "So the approach was to you." "The approach was to me." "You didn't say so on the terrace." "You were four hours old to me on that terrace," said Hana, "and you were standing at my elbow being enchanting at a minister." "That's fair." "What I want is this." She put two fingers on the cloth. "If the Kims come out of the other side of this with their logistics and Annie's money behind them, they take my space. Long leases, twenty years, fixed, signed at the same time as everything else and not afterwards on a promise." "And then you have a tenant instead of a predator," said Annie. "Then I have a tenant whose ownership I can read, and whose veto sits with you." Hana shrugged. "I am not doing this out of affection for anybody at this table." "No," said Annie. "That's why I'm still listening." "And Do-yun," said Georgij. He put it down plainly, because there was no way to put it down otherwise. "I read him as the weak one at the gala. He is not the weak one. He was working that ballroom while I watched him and I mistook it for nerves, and I found out from a photograph taken for somebody else." He turned his hand over. "You are both getting that from me tonight instead of in six weeks, when it would cost something." Annie did not say anything. Hana looked at him with her chin down for a moment, and then said, in a completely different voice from the one she had been using: "That's twice." "Twice?" "You told me on the floor at the Grand Hotel that a tool you have used once should be used carefully. I told you that. And now you have handed me a mistake before I asked for one." She turned her glass. "Annie, he does this." "He does," said Annie. * * * Then the rest of it. The two directors at the Paradise in Busan, one at a time, four hundred kilometres from where they worked, a month after their company had already been sold. The pattern of a man who buys a company and then goes on working the people who stayed in it. "That's Sang-hoon," said Hana. "That is exactly Sang-hoon. He never buys anything once." "No," said Georgij, "and now I know why he cannot." He put both hands on the cloth. "There is no majority to buy. There is one point four per cent and forty per cent scattered across six relatives who cannot read a balance sheet and who all telephone the same woman. You cannot make an offer for that. There is nobody to make it to." He looked up. "So he is not buying a company. He is turning people, one at a time, in hotels four hundred kilometres from where they work, and he has been doing it for at least a year, and he already has one of them." "Do-yun." "Do-yun." The hire car in the ramp. Three hours forty, nobody in the back, nobody collected. A corporate services company in Jung-gu with six employees. Four block bookings in fourteen months on the same account. "Somebody who waits outside buildings," said Georgij. "Give me the dates," said Hana. He gave her the three that meant nothing to him and he gave her the fourth, because it was on the same page and because he had told Annie in a car that he would not sort things before handing them over. Annie's face did nothing at all. Hana went through them twice. "June, I don't have. September I don't have." She stopped at the third. "The Monday last month is the night before the ministry published the consultation on the eastern parcel. Which could be nothing. Consultations leak for a week beforehand and everybody knows a day early." "And the fourth?" "The fourth is nothing to me at all," said Hana, and looked up. "Should it be?" There was about a second and a half in which Georgij could have said several things. "It's the night I was bought," he said. * * * The room went on being a room. Mr Baek's salt cooled on the table. Somewhere below them a door closed and somebody went along a passage. Hana put the paper down. "Then somebody sat outside that building for the whole of it," she said, "and did not go in, and three weeks later sat outside a hotel for three hours and forty minutes and did not go in." "Yes." "And you have a shell company with six employees." "Yes." "That is not enough to do anything with." "No. It is a parked car and a company that exists in order not to be a name." Georgij put the page flat. "Jang has had all four dates since the Wednesday and they have been worth precisely nothing since. There has never been anybody in a room with me who might have been able to place the other three." He looked at the two of them. "You are the first two people who have been." Annie said nothing whatsoever. She drank some water and put the glass down without a sound, and she had had the name of the man who stood behind the man in the second row since Georgij's first week in that house. * * * "One more thing, and I am going to say it in front of you rather than do it quietly," said Georgij. Hana waited. "I have the first section on those sixteen thousand square metres. Owner, dates, area. I have not pulled the second." "Why not?" "Because you pull the second section on somebody when you are about to rely on them, and until an hour ago I was not." He said it entirely without apology. "Now I am. On Monday I will look at what is charged against that land and who holds the paper." He turned his hand over. "I would do the same for anybody who put a number on this table, including her. I have already done it for two of the Kims." "Most people would have simply done it." "They would, and on Monday they would be holding exactly the same pages I will be holding." He turned his hand over. "What they would not have is you knowing they had them, and that is the whole of the difference." Hana laughed, and it was the real one, the one she had given him once before on a cold terrace. "None of my business how you work," she said. "Pull it." * * * Then he put the document on the table. It had taken him six days and it ran to nineteen pages and it was the best thing he had produced since he came into the house. Every figure in it was published. Every claim in it was true. Where something was a rumour it said so, and said how many mouths it had come through. Where he was guessing it said this is a guess, in the same size type as everything else, which is a thing almost nobody does, because it makes a document look weaker and makes it worth a great deal more. It was the most honest piece of work he had ever done and he had written all of it for one reader. He gave them the whole of it in eight minutes. Six months of outflow, a board in two halves since March, two rumours from two unconnected mouths, and four shipping routes with real berths that were worth what they were worth regardless of any of it. "Everything in there is true," he said. "There is nothing in it I have shaded. Where it is a rumour it says so and it says how many people it came through. Where I am guessing it says this is a guess." "And what is it for?" said Annie. "It's for Park Sang-hoon," said Georgij. "I am going to give it to him on the eighteenth and ask him where my analysis is wrong. He knows this trade and I do not, and a man like that does not correct anybody with words." "He corrects you by doing it better." "He corrects you by doing it. He will not tell me I am wrong about Hanseong. He will show me." He turned his hand over. "And then his money is in four shipping routes and a board that hates itself, at the precise moment when he needs to be liquid enough to take a logistics company away from a family under customs investigation." Hana was very still. "That's good," she said. "It is an apple," said Georgij. "Sweet, full of juice, and there is not a mark on the skin of it anywhere, because I have taken a great deal of trouble over the outside." Hana put her glass down. "The poison is that all of it is true. If I had shaded one line he would have found it in an afternoon, and I would never have got near him again." "A poisoned apple," said Hana. "Yes. And he is going to enjoy every mouthful of it." "There is a part of it that nobody at this table has said," said Georgij. "I am going to say it now, because in March somebody who is not sitting here is going to say it for us." "Go on." "There is a second half to that veto, and we have spent this evening calling it safety." He kept his hands where they were. "If you hold the routes through Incheon, your own intermediates arrive on the day they are supposed to arrive." "Yes." "So do everybody else's." He let that stand for a moment before he filled it in. "Four other groups in your business come in on those same two lanes, on those same permits, because there are no others. I have their filings. Hyeonjin takes about a fifth of one lane. The Yun operation at Ulsan takes more than that and has nothing else. Two smaller ones split what is left." He turned his hand over. "A veto over routes decides which container goes on which sailing when a sailing is full, and sailings on those lanes are full nine months of the year." Hana had stopped moving. "You would not have to close anything," said Georgij. "It would be enough that you could. Two weeks late in that trade is a broken contract and a cold reactor, and you would be the group whose cargo was already loaded, and somebody else would do the explaining." "And they would work that out." "By the second quarter. Nobody would ever say it out loud and nobody would ever have to, and the price of everything they buy from you would settle at whatever you felt like, for as long as you held the paper." "That is what I am buying," said Annie. "Yes." "I know." Nobody supplied a word for it, and nobody looked as though they were looking for one. "And the third thing," said Annie. "It is better than good, and it has a price, and I am going to put the price on this table before anybody agrees to anything." "Then put it on the table." "Hanseong has four thousand two hundred employees," said Georgij. * * * Nobody spoke for a moment. "He will not close it," he went on, in exactly the same voice. "Men like that do not close things, they hold them and bleed them and sell the parts that move. So it will not be four thousand two hundred. It will be perhaps a third of them inside two years, and it would probably have been a fifth of them anyway, because that group is dying and has been dying since before I could find it." "Probably," said Annie. "Probably. I am not going to stand in your dining room and tell you the number I am adding is zero, because I don't know that and neither do you." He stopped. "Everything in that document is true, and I wrote all nineteen pages of it in order to hurt a man with it. Both of those are mine and I intend to carry both." Annie looked at the pages. "Will he take it?" she said, to Hana. Hana did not answer straight away, which Georgij noticed and was glad of. "He will take it," she said at last. "It is honest, and nobody has handed that man an honest document in fifteen years. He will spend the first hour looking for the trick in it and the second hour deciding there isn't one." She looked across at Georgij. "That is what will finish him. Not the document. The hour." "Yes." "Do you know what you are, at that table?" "I'm the only thing at it that has already been sold," said Georgij, "and he has already asked me what I went for." * * * Hana put both hands on the table. "Then I want it on paper," she said. Annie looked at her. "Tonight there is nothing to put on paper. There is no company, no money in it, no signature from any Kim, and Ye-rin does not know this table exists." "I know what a conditional agreement is, and so do you." Hana said it entirely pleasantly. "A lease, signed now, that takes effect on the day your capital goes into that logistics arm. Twenty years, rent fixed, the buildings named. If the money has not gone in by the end of March it lapses and none of us ever mentions it again." "That costs me nothing today." "That is the point," said Hana. "It costs you nothing today and everything in April. A woman who intends to pay signs it in ten minutes." Nobody said anything for a moment. "May I put the other side of it down," said Georgij, "since neither of you is going to ask me to." "Put it down." "That document will exist." He said it in exactly the tone he had used for the twenty-nine people in this house. "A lease is drawn by somebody. It is typed by somebody. It sits in a firm, and if it is ever registered it sits somewhere worse than a firm, and every one of those people is a person who can be asked a question." "And what does it say to whoever asks?" "It says that in November two women had an arrangement about Incheon, four months before anything happened, and that one of them was already sure enough of the other to write down what the rent would be." He turned his hand over. "That will not kill anybody. It gives away a great deal more than a handshake does, and if I told you which of the two carried the worse risk I would be inventing it, because I do not know." "So you would advise against it," said Hana. "No. I would advise you both to know what you are buying with it, which is what I have just done." He sat back. "The decision belongs to the two of you, in halves, and I have no standing in either of them." Annie was quiet for what felt like a considerable time. "Draw it," she said. "You'll sign it?" "I will sign it on Monday, in front of you, and you will not have to ask me twice." Annie's face did not move anywhere. "You want to know why I am agreeing this quickly." "I know why. You need the ministry quiet and you need Ye-rin, and I am the only door to either." Hana turned her glass once. "I want you to know why I am asking." "Go on." "Because I have sat at this table for three hours and watched the two of you decide to ruin a man with nineteen pages in which every word is true." She said it without any heat at all. "You have both been extremely straight with me all evening. I believe every single thing either of you has said. And I would be a fool to be the only person in this room without a piece of paper." Georgij inclined his head, and did not say anything, because there was nothing to say to that which would not have been an argument against her being right. "Yes," said Annie. "You would." * * * They finished at ten past eleven. Hana took her coat herself, from the hall, and stopped for a moment beside the stone shelf with the shallow bowl on it, in the way of somebody who has been in a house before. "That was worth the drive," she said, to nobody in particular. Then, to Georgij, at the door: "You are in." "I'm sorry?" "At the Grand Hotel I told you I did not know yet whether you were the strongest thing she owns or the softest, and that I wanted you to take that away with you." She put her gloves on. "You have been carrying it for nineteen days. You can put it down." "And which is it?" "You told me tonight that you were wrong about a man's character and you told me before I asked you anything," said Hana. "The softest thing in this house would not have done that." She went out to her car. * * * "The eighteenth," said Annie, when the door had closed. "Yes, Mistress." "Take Jang's people to the door and not through it. Come home afterwards and not in the morning." "Yes." "And Georgij." "Mistress." "Four thousand two hundred," said Annie. "Do not lose that figure. I am going to ask you for it again in a year."