The glass was the first problem and it took him about ninety seconds to solve. A man who holds one drink for six hours is a man everybody eventually notices, and it is not the level in the glass that does it. It is the rate. A glass that never changes gets remembered by the staff, and a glass that is never put down gets remembered by everybody else. So he took a proper mouthful, early, standing where four people could see him do it. That was the drinking done. After that it was arithmetic. Champagne goes warm and flat inside twenty minutes in a room with that many lights in it, and handing a half-finished glass to a passing tray and lifting a fresh one off the same tray is the single least remarkable thing a person can do at an event of this kind. He did it five times before nine o'clock. The room would have said he had had five glasses. He had had one, in the first two minutes, in front of witnesses. He carried it in his left hand. A cold wet palm in a handshake is a thing men remember afterwards without knowing why they remember it, and he was going to be shaking a great many hands. * * * The girl at the edge of the group near the bar was still there at twenty past eight, and she was still holding the same glass. He came at her from the side and slightly behind, so that she saw him arrive rather than discovering him, and he stopped at the distance where a person can decline to speak to you without it being an event. "You do the reporting for the Daegu programme." She looked at him. "Yes." "Then you're the only person in this building who knows whether any of it worked." "That's not really how it," she said, and stopped, and started again. "Nobody asks about the reporting." "I'm asking about the reporting." He did not smile at her. He had decided against it in the car and he decided against it again standing there. A smile from a stranger is one more thing a person has to have an opinion about, and she had been having opinions about things at the edge of that group for the best part of an hour. "Ten of the fourteen sites spent it on staff," she said, after a moment. "Which everyone here would tell you is the wrong answer." "Is it the wrong answer?" "It's the only answer that shows up two years later." "Then say that at dinner." "I'm not at dinner." She said it entirely without self-pity, which he liked. "I'm here until the speeches and then I go back to the office and do the thing they'll all be told about in March." Georgij asked her about the fourteen sites. Then he asked her about the three that had not spent it on staff, and where the money had gone instead, and who had signed for it. Then he stopped asking about the money and asked about the people on the board. She told him. Not because he was clever, but because he stood still and did not look past her shoulder once, and because she had been standing at the edge of that group for fifty minutes and had not finished a sentence in any of them. Nine minutes. In the ninth minute she said something about a director's second appointment that she would not have said in the first. He did not lean in when she said it. He asked one more question, about something else entirely, so that the last thing she would remember saying was not that one. She had had the best nine minutes of her evening. He had two things he had walked in without. Both of those were true. Neither of them cancelled the other, and he had stopped expecting them to some years ago. "You haven't drunk any of that," she said, as he was going. He stopped. It was the first sentence anybody had said to him all evening that he had not steered. "Neither have you," he said. "Mine's so I've got something to do with my hands." "Yes," said Georgij. "Mine too." Which was true, as far as it went. It was also the first thing he had said in six hours that he had not decided on before he said it, and he heard that happen, and he went away from her carrying it. * * * At twenty-five to nine he was standing at the north end of the bar, in a place where a man can be looking at nothing in particular, with two people between himself and the two men he was listening to. Being unapproachable in a room where you have spent an hour being delightful is a separate skill and he had built it in the same houses as the smile. It comes down to angle. Face the wrong way, hold something, and let your eyes go somewhere that is not a person. Nobody interrupts a man who is looking at a wall. The two directors were of the same company, which was not by itself the point. The company was a logistics firm with three hundred people and a yard at Pyeongtaek, and it had been bought in February, and both of these men had stayed on afterwards in jobs that were the same size and a different shape. The point was that both of them had been in the same hotel in Busan on the same four nights in March, and that Georgij had that from a booking record six days ago and had never once been able to work out what it meant. He had assumed it meant they had gone together. They had not gone together. He understood that inside about fifteen seconds, from the way the shorter one was talking, which was the way a man talks when he is finding out something at the same time as he says it. "You were at the Paradise," the taller one said. "In March." "...Yes." "So was I." A pause of the kind you can hear across two people. "You never said." "I saw your car. Thursday, about seven." The taller one had known for months and had been carrying it all evening looking for somewhere to put it down. "Who did you have dinner with?" The shorter man did not answer that. He drank instead, and looked at the room, and then he said a name, and he said it quietly and in the manner of a man dropping something into a bin. Georgij, who was looking at a wall, did not move at all. He had heard that name for the first time in his life sixty-three minutes ago, out of the mouth of a cheerful man of sixty-one who had thought he was being kind. He gives dinners. Two directors of the same company. The same hotel, the same four nights. Neither of them told that the other was coming. Both of them at dinner with a man who sits on no board, appears in no annual report, and had never once been in this building in nineteen years. And the four nights had been in March. The company had gone in February. So the dinners had not come after the sale, the way dinners do, when a new owner takes the old management out and tells them how much he values continuity. They had come a month later, one man at a time, to a hotel four hundred kilometres from where either of them worked. Whatever had been done to that company, it had gone on being done afterwards, quietly, to the men who were still sitting in it. Georgij had no idea at all what that was for. He wrote it down in his head anyway, in the order it had arrived, because he had learned a long time ago that a thing you cannot use is only a thing you cannot use yet. Georgij stood at the wall for another forty seconds, because leaving immediately after hearing something is how people find out that you were listening. Then he put a warm glass on a tray and took a cold one. * * * He saw the woman in the dark red at a quarter to nine, and she was looking at him. Not at Annie, who was ten metres away and easier to look at. Not at the room. She was standing with two other people, and she was nodding at whatever one of them was saying, and her eyes were on Georgij and had been for some time. When he looked back she did not do the thing people do, which is to move the eyes away and be busy. She let him see that she had been looking, and then she went back to the conversation. He did not have to put her on any list. She had been on the twelve since the second week, and she was one of the nine that were tied to each other in ways the room did not know about. * * * Chairman Woo found him at ten to nine, and he had four people with him. "This is the one I was telling you about," said Chairman Woo, which is a sentence that has ended a great many careers. Georgij gave them the wide one. "He reads everything," said the chairman, delighted, warming his hands at it. "Everything. Go on, then. Ask him something." Nobody wanted to be the one to ask, so the chairman asked, because it had been his idea and because he was enjoying himself, and because a man of that age who has decided he likes you will show you off the way he shows off a boat. "Daehan Chemical," he said. "Interim. What did they do on margin?" It was not a difficult question. It was a public number. It was also being asked in front of five people, one of whom sat on the board of a company that had bought forty per cent of Daehan Chemical's output for eight years and had not renewed in the spring. Georgij knew the number. He also knew the second sentence, which was the one that explained the number, and which had a man standing two feet away in it. He gave the number. "Down four hundred basis points on the half. Eleven-eighty a tonne against the fifteen-twenty everybody had been told to expect in January." "There you are," said Chairman Woo, thrilled. "The half before that was worse," said Georgij, "and they didn't say so, and where they didn't say so is page thirty-one, in a footnote about an inventory reclassification, which I would recommend to anybody who enjoys that sort of thing." Then he stopped. The next clause was the one the whole group was waiting for without knowing it. It was four words long. Those four words were the name of a customer who had taken forty per cent of the output for eight years and had walked away in April. The customer was standing two feet to Georgij's right with a glass in his hand. Georgij let the sentence end where it ended. He turned his hand over, and smiled at the chairman, and said nothing else at all. Somebody laughed. Somebody said something about footnotes. The group moved on inside twenty seconds, the way groups do, and the man from the board of the company that had not renewed in the spring did not know that anything had happened. Four of the five did not know that anything had happened. The woman in the dark red had come to stand at the outer edge of it at some point, and she had not been there when the chairman started. She had heard him stop. He knew she had heard him stop, because when he looked over she was already looking at him, and she raised her glass about two centimetres off the horizontal. Not a toast. An acknowledgement. The sort of thing one professional gives another when a difficult thing has been done well. Georgij inclined his head a fraction, and did not smile, and went to find his table. * * * The auction was between the main course and the speeches. The auctioneer was a broadcaster with a good voice, and there was a lectern, and there was a screen. The lots were on cards on the tables and the numbers were on paddles and there were nine of them. A guitar signed by somebody Georgij had never heard of, which went for thirty-eight million won to a man at table six who did not want it and did want eight hundred people to watch him not want it. A week in a villa on Jeju, with staff. Two paintings. A watch. A shooting weekend. A boat. Georgij sat on Annie's left with his hands loose on the cloth and watched. Lot nine was the last one. "Our final lot this evening, and I think you'll agree it's the one worth waiting for." The screen changed. "Chef Bang Seung-min. Trained in Lyon and in Tokyo. Two restaurants, one of which none of you can get into, as several of you have told me tonight." The room laughed. "He will come to your house, on an evening of your choosing, with his own people, and he will cook for eight." Chef Bang was standing to the left of the lectern in his whites. He was about forty and he had his hands folded in front of him, and he was smiling, and he had clearly been told where to stand and when to come out, and he did all of it perfectly well. The bidding started at ten and went up the room in fives. The auctioneer worked it very well. He got it to sixty and then to sixty-two, and then he stopped, and Chef Bang went on smiling beside the lectern with his hands folded while a room of eight hundred people decided what an evening of him was worth. "Sixty-two. Going once." Georgij's hands did not move. "Going twice." Sixty-two million won for one evening of one man's work. He did the arithmetic before he could decide not to, the way he had done arithmetic in every room he had ever been put in, and the answer was three and a half. The gavel was wooden and about the length of a spoon. There was a little brass plate screwed to the top of the lectern to take the blow. In a room with eight hundred people in it and a ceiling that high, it made almost no sound at all. A small dry knock. Somebody at table nine did not look up. "Sold." Applause, and Chef Bang bowed to it, twice, once to the room and once to the table that had bought him. Georgij applauded. He did it at exactly the speed of the people around him, and he stopped at exactly the moment they stopped, and there was nothing whatsoever on his face, and Annie did not turn her head. She did not turn it during the applause, or after it, or when the waiters started to come round again. But she had not turned it for the whole of the minute before the gavel either, which is not a thing a woman does with her head by accident, and Georgij understood at some point during the dessert that she had been not-looking at him for the whole of the auction. He put that with the rest. It was the only thing anybody had done for him all evening, and nobody in the room had seen it, and it had cost her nothing, and he was aware that none of those three facts made it smaller.

Something to do with my hands