Day 46 · Tuesday 18 November The office was in Yeouido on the ninth floor of a building Park Sang-hoon had bought in 2011 and had never bothered to put his name on. There was a room off it with a table for six in it and two places laid at one end. That told Georgij before anybody had said a word. Nobody else was coming, and nobody was going to be taking notes. Jang's two men came as far as the lifts and no further. That had been Annie's instruction and Georgij had intended to follow it anyway, because a man who brings people through a door into a room laid for two has said something about the evening before he sits down. * * * Sang-hoon was already there. He did not get up. He was in a chair with his back three quarters to the window and the city behind him, and he indicated the seat opposite with two fingers, and the seat opposite had the window in its eyes. "Sit down." Georgij sat down. The food came almost at once, which meant it had been ordered before he arrived, which meant the length of the evening had been decided by somebody else, which was fine. He ate. He ate properly and without hurrying and he said so when it was good, and at one point he asked what the thing with the perilla in it was called and wrote nothing down and remembered it. A man who does not eat at another man's table has told him that he does not trust the table. Georgij had spent seventeen years in houses where that was the cheapest information you could give away. He drank one glass and did not refuse the second and did not finish it. * * * "You ask people to guide you," said Sang-hoon. Twelve minutes in. Before the second dish. "I do." "Hong. And a man from Land and Infrastructure who talks to my people about other things." He said it the way a man reads out a delivery note. "Two in one evening, in almost the same words." "Three, if you count tonight." Georgij put his chopsticks down. "I asked you for this dinner in order to be told how a man takes something that isn't his. That is the same request in a better suit." Something happened at the corner of Sang-hoon's mouth. "Most people would have said it was a coincidence." "It isn't one. It is the only tool I own that costs nothing and works on men who have thirty years on me." He said it flatly. "I used it twice in one evening because it worked the first time. It has now been reported to you by two separate people, which is roughly what I deserved." "You could have stopped using it." "I have not stopped, because I am actually asking," said Georgij. "That is the whole of it. It is why it works and it is why it looks like something." * * * "Before we go any further," he said, "I would like to tell you how I am going to conduct this evening, because it will save us both a great deal of time." "Go on." "Three things." He turned his hand over. "The first is that I will not say anything to you that is untrue. Not this evening and not afterwards. If I am guessing I will say I am guessing." "Everybody says that." "Yes. The second is what makes it worth anything." He kept his voice exactly where it had been. "There are things I am not permitted to say. When we reach one, I will tell you that we have reached one. I will not change the subject, and I will not give you a smaller answer and let you think it was the whole of it." Park Sang-hoon looked at him for the first time since he had sat down. "You understand what that gives me." "It tells you where the walls are. Yes." "Most men prefer that you never find the wall at all." "Most men will therefore be lied to by me the moment it matters, and they will not know when," said Georgij. "You would. You would know inside a minute, and then everything else I had said all evening would be worth nothing, including the part I came here to give you." "And the third thing." "The third is not a method, it is a fact, and you are going to have it from me instead of working it out." He said it without any weight anywhere. "I belong to one person. She paid a great deal for me and she did it recently, and she has had nothing back yet worth the money." "Everybody in this city knows that." "Then it costs me nothing to say it, and I am not going to sit here hoping you never mention it." A small pause. "A man in my position who is coy about who owns him is out of this business in six months, and rightly." Sang-hoon poured himself water. "Say the sentence you have been building towards." "You will ask me about the Kims at some point tonight," said Georgij. "When you do, I will tell you that I am not going to answer, and I will not dress it up." "That is an answer." "Yes. It is the only one available to me and I know exactly what it costs." He picked his chopsticks back up. "I am paying it in the first twenty minutes, with you watching, instead of having it taken off me in the third hour when I am tired." * * * There were four of them in the end. The first came at forty minutes, over the fish, and it was about a bank. "Who cleared your side on the Daehan position in the spring?" "I am not going to answer that." "Because you don't know." "Because I do." Sang-hoon nodded once and went on eating, and it went past like a car. * * * The second was about Hana, and Georgij had not expected it to come from that direction. "Does she own anything in Incheon?" "I am not going to answer that." That one cost him more than any of the others and he did not show a second of it. Hana had put it on a table herself, in a room with three people in it, and it was not his to move. He had pulled the second section on her sixteen thousand square metres the previous afternoon. The instruction had come from her, at her own table and in front of Annie, and she had not asked him what he expected to find. What was charged against that land, and who held the paper, made this refusal considerably more expensive than it would have been five days ago. "She does," said Sang-hoon, to nobody in particular, and ate. Georgij let that sit exactly where it was and did not touch it. There was no version of correcting it that was not a conversation about it. * * * The third was the Kims and it came at an hour and ten. "How much of the Kim family does your side already have?" "I am not going to answer that." "You said it would come." "I did." "Would you like to know what you have just told me?" "I know what I have just told you," said Georgij. "I told you it existed. You had already assumed it. Annie takes her intermediates through two lanes, and the permits for them sit with one family and are not being issued again. You have seen the manifests. A man in your trade does not need a picture drawn for him." He met the eyes across the table. "What you did not have until this minute is confirmation. That is what it cost me. It is not nothing and I am not going to pretend it was." Sang-hoon put his glass down. "You are the first person who has ever told me the price of what he just gave me." "You would have worked it out before the end of the evening. I preferred to be the one who said it." * * * The fourth came late and it had no shape at all. "Do you sleep in her house?" "I am not going to answer that." Park Sang-hoon looked at him for slightly too long. Then he laughed, and it was the second time Georgij had heard it, and it was not longer than the first. "That one was not work," he said. "I wanted to know." "I know." * * * In between the four of them he got the evening he had come for. Sang-hoon talked about the two companies for the better part of an hour, because Georgij asked him how and never once asked him why, and because nobody had asked him how in a very long time. Every story in that hour was about one person. He described a finance director at the yard in Pyeongtaek who had a son at a school he could not afford and who was never asked for anything at all, not once, for eleven months. He described the value of being the only person who telephones a man on the day his mother dies. He described sitting in four separate rooms with four different members of one board and telling each of them the truth. The truth had been a different one in every room. None of the four had been a lie. "That is the part people get wrong," he said. "They think you buy the company. You are buying the ten minutes in which a man decides that you are the one who understands his position." Georgij said very little. He was doing arithmetic. Pyeongtaek was February. Busan was March, one director at a time, four hundred kilometres from where they worked. What was happening to the Kims was the same thing at the same stage, and it had started earlier than anybody at Annie's table had thought, and Do-yun was not the beginning of it. "How long does that take?" he asked. "With a family? Two years. Eighteen months if somebody frightens them for me." Sang-hoon shrugged. "Fear is the cheapest thing on the market. It is always available and it never has to be bought from the person who supplies it." * * * He put the document on the table at ten past ten. "I have one more thing and then I will stop taking your evening." "What is it?" "A group called Hanseong." Georgij turned it round so that it faced the right way. "Nineteen pages. Six months of capital going out. A board that split in March. Two rumours about money missing at a subsidiary from two mouths that have no reason to know each other. And four shipping routes with real berths and real slots." "And you want." "I want you to tell me where I am wrong." Sang-hoon did not touch it. "Why?" "Because you have been in this thirty years and I have been in it a very short time. This is the first thing I have written that I believe, and if I believe it for stupid reasons then you are the only person who will tell me so." "That is the guidance again." "It is." "That is four. Two of them are mine, and they come from a man who told me at the start of the evening that he knows exactly how it looks." Sang-hoon still did not touch the pages. "So tell me what you get if I say you are right." Georgij did not answer straight away. "If this is wrong, then I am not wrong about a shipping group," he said. "I am wrong about the way I read all of it, and every page I have put in front of her is worth less than she thinks it is, and neither of us would know which pages." He put his hands flat. "I would rather be told that by you in November than by her in March." Park Sang-hoon looked at him for some time. "That cost you a great deal more than the first one." "Yes." "Then why give it?" "Because the first one was true and thin. You would have spent the rest of the evening working out what was behind it, and that costs me more than the sentence does." "Go on," said Sang-hoon. "Everything in it is published," said Georgij. "Where it is a rumour it says so and says how many mouths it came through. Where I am guessing it says this is a guess." "In the same size type." Sang-hoon put one finger on the corner of the first page and left it there. "Everybody shrinks the part they are not certain of. I have read a great many documents and I read the small type first, and I have never once been wrong about the man afterwards." Then he pulled the document across the table. He read the first page. Then he read the second page. Then he turned back to the first page and read it again, which Georgij had been hoping for and had not allowed himself to expect. Nothing at all happened to his face. "This is not for me," he said. "No. I would like it back on Thursday." "You wrote it. You have it." "I would like it back on Thursday." Park Sang-hoon did not say anything for a moment, and did not take his hand off the pages either. "You'll get it back on Thursday." * * * They talked about other things for twenty minutes. They talked about a harbour in Vladivostok, and about a man they both disliked, and about whether the ceiling in the Grand Hotel was as hideous as everybody said. Sang-hoon was almost pleasant. Georgij was extremely pleasant. The nineteen pages sat at the man's left elbow with his hand resting on the corner of them. He did not look at them again. He did not need to. Twice in those twenty minutes he asked a question that was not about anything they were discussing. Once about slot fees on a lane that appeared on page seven. Once about whether a board that has stopped meeting can still authorise a disposal. Georgij answered both accurately and did not remark on either. That was the bite. It happened at a table with the plates still on it, in the middle of a conversation about a ceiling, and neither of them mentioned it, and both of them knew. * * * At the door Sang-hoon shook his hand, which he had not done on arrival. "You will have realised," he said, "that I checked you before tonight." "You told me within twelve minutes. That was courteous." "Courtesy had nothing to do with it." He let go of the hand. "I wanted to see what you did with it while there was still food on the table." "And?" "And you are either exactly what you look like," said Park Sang-hoon, "or you are the best-made thing anybody has ever put in front of me." He turned and went back into the room where the nineteen pages were. * * * Mr Pyo had the car at the kerb with the heater on. The two drivers went week and week about and this one was his. Annie was in the back of it. He looked up at the ninth floor before he looked at her, which was the right order and which he did not enjoy. The windows were lit and there was nobody standing in any of them. Then he got in. She had not said she would be there. She had said come home afterwards and not in the morning, and that had been the whole of the instruction. There had been nothing in it about a car in Yeouido at twenty to eleven with a woman already sitting in the back. "Well," said Annie. "May I have ten minutes, Mistress, before I give you any of it?" "Take them." She looked out of her own window and did not ask him anything else, and the lights of Yeouido went past and then stopped going past. Then he took out the notebook. It was paper and it lived in his own pocket, and it was the only thing he wrote on that a company in Yeouido did not bill her monthly to read. He wrote four lines in it with her sitting an arm's length away, and she watched him do it, and she did not ask what any of them were. Pyeongtaek. February. Eleven months of asking for nothing. Two years for a family. Eighteen months if somebody frightens them. Slot fees, page seven. Disposal by a board that has stopped meeting, page fourteen. He read the first page twice. Then he sat back and did the other arithmetic, the one he had been putting off since the second course. Four times he had told Park Sang-hoon that they had reached a wall, and four times he had used the word instead of changing the subject. Every one of the four had been true. He had promised nothing he had not delivered, and he had not said a single untrue word in three and a half hours. He had also drawn the man a map. Four walls, all of them real, and nothing anywhere on it to say which one had something behind it worth the climb. One of the four was the whole of the business. One of them was a man asking where he sleeps. They had been given exactly the same weight, and giving them exactly the same weight was the most deliberate thing he had done all evening. Every word of it had been true. He had only declined to say which of the four walls was load-bearing, and no man on earth is owed that. Georgij looked out at the river going past under the bridge. He had spent three and a half hours being scrupulously honest with a man, in a way designed from the first minute to mislead him. He was aware of that with some precision, and he did not go looking for a kinder word for it. He did not know yet whether the map would hold. If it did not hold, he would find out from somebody else's mouth, in about six weeks. Annie had not asked him a single question since the kerb. She was not going to, either, and the ten minutes had run out somewhere on the expressway. He put the notebook back in his pocket and turned his head.

Where the walls are