The envelope came at nine in the morning by a courier who did not ask anybody to sign for it, and Mrs Seo carried it in and put it on the stone shelf beside the bowl. It sat in exactly the place the remote had lain for the first eight days he was in the house. Georgij went past it four times before eleven. He did not touch it, and he did not need to, because it was the size and thickness of the thing he had been expecting for three weeks and because a house that sends you a plain envelope by a courier with no signature is a house that has decided you are a buyer of record. * * * She sent for him at eleven. The envelope was open on the desk. So was what had been inside it, face up, at the page she had been reading, and she had not put anything on top of it and had not turned it over when he came in. "The car is at seven," Annie said. "You'll come down at half past six and let Mrs Seo look at you, because she will do it anyway and it is faster if you agree to it." "Yes, Mistress." "You'll come in with me and you will be at my elbow for the first quarter of an hour, and after that you will not be, and I would rather you didn't come and find me. If I want you I'll find you." She turned a page of something else, not the catalogue. "Nobody in that room will ask you what you do. They'll ask you where you were educated. It's the same question with better manners." "I know." "Then you have an answer." "I have several." He was standing at the corner of the desk and the catalogue was forty centimetres from his hand, and she went on reading and did not move it, and after a moment he understood that she was not going to. So he read it upside down, which he could do, and had been able to do since a house in Busan when he was twenty. * * * They renumber every month, so the numbers meant nothing. He went down the descriptions instead, which take a particular kind of reading, because the whole thing is written in the flat abbreviated language of a livestock list and the trick is not to stop. Female, fifteen. Male, twenty-two, two languages. Male, twenty-six, carrying the same phrase they had put against him three weeks earlier, which that house evidently kept ready and reached for whenever the price needed lifting. A woman of thirty-one with a mark against her indicating a second return. Twenty-three lots. Not one of them was a male of sixteen with a file that rounded upward. He read the whole thing a second time, backwards, the way you check figures. Then he looked up. Annie was watching him. "Twenty-two seconds a page," she said. "Upside down." "Yes." She did not ask him what he had been looking for. She turned the catalogue round with one finger, so that it faced him, which was worse than being asked. "He isn't in it," Georgij said. "No." He waited. She let him wait, and went on looking at him, and there was nothing in her face at all, and it went on long enough that he understood he had been given the whole of the answer he was going to get and that it consisted of the word no. Withdrawn or sold. A catalogue prints neither, and both of those words fit inside the same silence, and there is no way in the world to tell them apart from the outside of it. He had asked her in the car on the first night, and again across this desk before that first day was out. He did not ask a third time. "There is something else in that file that I would like to put to you," he said instead, in exactly the register he had used for the car, "and it isn't the evening. It's the room." "Go on." * * * "Three of the names on my ninety-one were in the basement in Gangnam on the night you bought me." Nothing moved in her face. "The gentleman in the fourth row who settled inside the quarter hour. The lady by the pillar. And one of the seven at the front with a notebook, who was spending somebody else's money that night and will be spending his own tonight." He turned his hand over. "All three are on the list for the Grand Hotel. All three will be in that room. Two of them will be within forty feet of you at some point in the evening, because the tables are laid to a plan and I have the plan." "And." "And every one of them watched a woman at the back buy something that talks, for two-twenty, after it had opened its mouth in front of nineteen people." He said it without any particular weight on it. "In three weeks nobody has come near you about it. That is either because they don't care, which I don't believe of a room like that, or because somebody has already made it not worth discussing." Annie sat back. "You're asking whether I've handled it." "No, Mistress. I'm telling you I don't know whether you have, and that I'd rather walk into that room knowing which of the two it is, because those are two entirely different evenings and I'd work them differently." "Say how differently." "If it's been handled, then the three of them are furniture and I spend my night on the twelve who matter." A small pause. "If it hasn't, then the three of them are the only people in that building who know what I am, and one of them will say it to somebody before midnight, out of nothing worse than boredom, and my evening is about being in a different part of the room to whichever one of them has been drinking." Annie looked at him for a moment. "It's been handled," she said. "Thank you." "Don't." She said it flatly and without heat. "You've just told me something I did not know, which is that they're seated to a plan and that you have it, and you dressed it up as a question in order to hand it to me without it looking like a gift. I'd rather you didn't do that in this house. It's expensive to keep track of." Georgij inclined his head, and did not apologise, because she had not asked him to and because apologising would have been the same manoeuvre a third time. "Then you'll have it straight from now on," he said, "and you can decide for yourself what any of it is worth." "Quid pro quo," said Annie, and went back to her page. * * * The suit came at two. The old man did not come with it. His assistant did, and he stood with his hands behind his back while Georgij put it on, and then he knelt and did something to the left trouser cuff with two pins and a piece of chalk and did not speak for nine minutes. The collar of the shirt stood four centimetres higher than a collar stands. It closed at the throat with a hook and an eye, which meant it closed flat and closed exactly, and inside it there was a band of grosgrain that sat between the linen and the steel. The steel did not show. Georgij stood in front of the glass in the east room for slightly longer than the fitting required, and looked at a man in a black dinner jacket with a white shirt and a high collar and no visible reason for the collar to be high. He kept his chin level. Not up. Level. Men lift the chin when there is something at the throat, and then everybody looks at the throat. "Sir," said the assistant, from the floor. "The cuff will be right by six." "Thank you. Tell him the grosgrain was correct." "He knows, sir." * * * At six Jang came to find him in the east room. "Two of mine go with the car. Song on the door of it and one inside the building who will not be near you." He said it the way you read out a delivery note, which Georgij noticed and liked. "I'll be at the hotel from half five. Service corridor behind the ballroom, second door, and there is a man on it who has my name." "Thank you." "You won't need it." "Probably not." Georgij was doing the second cufflink. "The seating plan has her at table four and the doors behind table four are locked from the ballroom side after the speeches. That's a hotel's decision and not yours, and I'd rather you knew before you got there than after." Jang stood in the doorway for a moment. "Page six," he said. "The night man's route." "Yes." "He's on a different one since Tuesday. I wrote it and I didn't tell you." A shrug that was not quite an apology and was not meant to be. "You'll want to do it again." "I will," said Georgij, and meant it, and was pleased in a way he did not examine. * * * At six he shaved, and at twenty past he dressed, and at half past he went down and let Mrs Seo look at him. She walked round him once. She took something off the shoulder that he could not see and would not have been able to find. She pulled about four millimetres of shirt cuff out from under the jacket sleeve on the left and left the right one where it was, because it had been where it should be. Then she stood in front of him and straightened nothing at all, which is what people do when they have run out of reasons to keep looking. "Nine years," Mrs Seo said, "and she has never once taken anybody into a room like that with her. Not one person." "No." Mrs Seo stepped back. "Eat something before you go. There will be food and you will not have time to touch any of it, and a man who has not eaten agrees to things at eleven o'clock that he would not agree to at eight." "Yes, Mrs Seo." "And come back." She said it in exactly the tone she had used for the shirt cuff, and she was already turning away when she said it, and she did not wait to see what he did with it. * * * Annie came down at nine minutes to seven. He had been at the foot of the stairs for four of those minutes and had spent them looking at the front door and not at the shelf beside it. She was in dark green. No jewellery except the ring on the wrong hand, and her hair up, and in her left hand a clutch about the size of a paperback, which is a bag with room in it for a telephone, a lipstick and nothing else at all. She stopped on the second step, which put her eyes level with his. "Turn round." He turned round. "That's better than I expected," she said, "and I paid enough to expect a good deal." Then she came down the last two steps, and she opened the clutch in front of him, without any ceremony and without looking away from his face, and took out the lipstick and put it in the pocket of her coat. The remote went into the space where the lipstick had been. She closed the bag. Neither of them said anything about it, then or at any point in the seven hours that followed, and Georgij, who had spent four minutes at the foot of those stairs not looking at a shelf, found that he now knew precisely which compartment of which bag, and which side of the room it was standing on, and that he was going to know it every minute until they came home. Outside, the car came round onto the gravel and stopped. "Well," said Annie. "Let's go and be looked at."