"Two hundred and ten kilos," Ma Jun-oh said, and the crate on the van floor in front of him held frozen mackerel and weighed sixty.
Nobody in the van corrected him. The two ward men riding in the back with the load looked at the crate, and then at each other, and then out of the window at the sodium lights of the Songhae bypass going by in their long orange stitches, because neither of them wanted to be the man who told a collector his Writ had stopped working.
Ji-hoon, in the passenger seat, turned round.
"Say it again."
"Two hundred and—" Jun-oh stopped. He put his hand flat on the crate the way a man puts his hand on a dog he does not trust. He had been able to do this since he was twenty-six: look at a box, any box, and know what was in it to within half a kilo, which was a small stupid gift that had made him useful on the water and had let him raise a daughter. His mouth moved. "Sixty. Sixty. Chief, I said two hundred, didn't I. I said it like I *knew* it."
"You said it like you knew it," Ji-hoon agreed.
That was the part the books never bothered with, he thought. Not that a failing Writ gives a man the wrong number. That it gives him the wrong number with the exact same certainty as the right one, so there is no seam, no wobble, nothing to catch. A man at Stage 3 is not a man who doubts himself. He is a man who is wrong at full confidence, which is a much more expensive thing to be.
"Chief." One of the men in the back. "His shirt."
The letters had opened.
They had been under the skin along Jun-oh's ribs for nine days, ink-dark, pressed through from the far side the way writing shows through cheap paper, and now they were not under anything. The lines of the clause had split along their own strokes, and blood was coming up out of the writing — not from a wound, from the *letters*, each character weeping its own shape, so that the clause was legible in wet red through the cotton: *and I will take nothing upon the water that I do not bring.*
Jun-oh looked down at himself with an expression Ji-hoon would carry for a long time. Not fear. Embarrassment. A man in a van full of his colleagues, apologising with his face for bleeding on the upholstery.
"Pull over at the service lane," Ji-hoon said to the driver, and to the back: "Get his coat off him, put it under him, and nobody says anything about this at the sauna."
They went past the northbound curve before the toll. There was still no barrier on it. There was a black scar on the tarmac where somebody had swept the worst of it up, eight days old and already going grey at the edges, and Ji-hoon looked at it for as long as a man looks at any road, which is to say not at all, and then held his eyes on the dashboard clock instead.
01:54, it said. Thursday.
Pyo Gi-taek wanted an answer by Friday.
* * *
Daylight, and the map.
He did it in the back of the noodle shop with Grandmother Ha's account book pushed aside, using a tourist map of Myeongho-dong that the district office gave away, and a red pen borrowed from Cheol, and no notes.
The sauna on Hyeonchung-ro: two hundred and forty men a day through the door in winter, and the ward's messages moved through the locker attendant, and eleven of Myeongho's collectors ate their lunch in the rest room upstairs because it was warm and free.
The pawn office beside it: every household in the east quarter had been through that counter at least once, which meant Ji-hoon knew what every household had been prepared to lose, which was the closest thing a ward chief had to a census.
Chang's wholesale fish stall on the market corner: every trolley in the east quarter turned around at that stall because the lane was too narrow past it. Not a business. A hinge.
He marked all three and then, because Cheol was sitting four feet away eating, he did not look at the map for longer than three seconds at a time.
That was the housekeeping. The Second Pair did not announce itself. Somewhere in a week, for a minute or two at a time, Baek Cheol's vision would simply be Ji-hoon's vision — sworn to protect his brother, and the shadow of that oath was that the brother could not be lost sight of — and there was no warning and no pattern, and after six years Ji-hoon had reduced it to a set of small habits. Never read anything important twice through. Never look at a face you are about to lie to for longer than a conversation needs. Keep the important thing in your hand, below the table edge, and look at the wall.
"You've marked the anchor," Cheol said, with his mouth full.
"I've marked three shops."
"You've marked the *anchor*, hyung, I can read a map. Who wants them?"
"Somebody who understands them better than I would like," Ji-hoon said, which was true, and which let Cheol arrive at Jang Ryu without being driven there, and Ji-hoon watched him arrive and said nothing further.
"If the sauna goes, the locker room goes. If the locker room goes—"
"Then we hold our meetings in a car park in February. Yes."
"So it's no."
"It's arithmetic," Ji-hoon said, and folded the map into his inside pocket.
* * *
Chairman Do Man-seok was doing dried pollack in the courtyard behind the sauna, which meant he had been up since five, because the fish had to soak.
He had the sleeves of his cardigan pushed to the elbow and his forearms in the water to the wrist, working the flesh apart with his thumbs, and two young men beside him were doing it wrong and being shown how without once being made to feel stupid. The braise pot was already on. The whole courtyard smelled of it — soy, garlic, the sweet dry-salt ghost of the fish — and four of Ji-hoon's own collectors were sitting on upturned crates against the wall waiting to be fed, because the chairman fed anyone who happened to be standing there at noon, and everyone in Myeongho knew where to happen to be standing.
"Ji-hoon-ah." Man-seok did not look up. "Come and tell me if this needs more."
Ji-hoon tasted it off the back of the offered spoon. It needed more.
"It's right," he said.
"It is not right. It needs sugar and you are being polite, which you are usually too expensive to be." Man-seok added the sugar. "So it is money."
"It's Terminal Nine."
"Same thing, at that end of the city." He wiped his hands on a cloth over his shoulder. "Say it in one sentence, the way you do."
"Pyo Gi-taek is holding a Myeongho man's debt at three and wants it to finish. He will release him for three shops or for my name in the book, and he wants the shops, and the shops are the sauna, Chang's stall and the pawn office."
Man-seok's hands stopped for one beat and then went on working. Behind him, the young men had stopped pretending not to listen, and the four collectors against the wall were looking at the ground with the particular concentration of men listening very hard.
"And you want?"
"I want permission."
"For which one?"
"For whichever one costs the house money," Ji-hoon said. "Both of them do."
Man-seok laughed, and the courtyard relaxed a degree, and then he said, still smiling, "No."
Ji-hoon waited.
"A ward is yours or it isn't, Ji-hoon-ah." The old man tipped the pollack into the pot and it hissed. "You came into my courtyard with four of your own men sitting against that wall, so you already knew you were asking in public, and you asked anyway, which means you wanted them to hear me say yes. Then you would have carried my yes back to Terminal Nine and it would have been my decision, and if it went badly it would have been my mistake, and you would still have been the chief who lost three shops but not the man who chose to. That is a good piece of work. I am proud of it. The answer is still no."
"Chairman—"
"Don't ask me to be your father about money." He said it warmly. He said everything warmly. "About your health, yes. About a woman, if you ever bothered. Not about a ward. Do you know what I would be doing to you if I decided this?"
"Yes," Ji-hoon said.
"Say it."
"You would be telling the house that Myeongho's chief needs a ruling."
"Four weeks before I name a successor." Man-seok put the lid on. "Eat with us. It'll be an hour."
Ji-hoon ate with them. The pollack was very good. He sat on a crate against the wall with the collectors and listened to the chairman remember the name of one man's mother, and the name of another man's mother who had died in the spring, and the exact street she had sold vegetables on, and he understood with complete clarity that he had just been refused for the first time in six years and that the refusal had been an act of affection, delivered in front of witnesses, because Do Man-seok wanted the house to see what Kang Ji-hoon did when nobody would decide for him.
The old man caught him at the gate on the way out and put a hand on the back of his neck.
"Whatever it is," Man-seok said, "do it before Friday. Things decided on a Saturday have a smell."
* * *
The girl was nine and her name was Ma Seo-yeong and she was doing her homework on the bench in the women's changing room, because it was the warmest room in the sauna and the only one with nobody in it after ten.
Her father was in the rest room across the corridor with his shirt off and a towel around his ribs, bleeding slowly through the towel, and the attendant had been told to change it every hour and to say, if the girl asked, that it was his back and that backs took a while.
Ji-hoon stopped in the doorway. She had four coloured pens laid out in a row, in order, and was doing multiplication in the blue one.
"Chief." She stood up and bowed, and sat down again, and went straight back to the page. Children in Myeongho bowed to him the way children anywhere bow to a bus driver or a doctor: without curiosity.
"Is that eight times seven?"
"Fifty-six."
"How long have you known that?"
"Since Tuesday." She wrote it. "Appa checks them. He's good at numbers."
"He is," Ji-hoon said. "He has always been good at numbers."
It was a true sentence. He left it on the table between them and went out into the corridor, and stood for a moment in the smell of wet tile and cheap shampoo, and did the count he had been avoiding all day, which was not a count of money.
Forty-one million missing from the ward's books, eight days to an audit, a hole that existed because this man had been buying blank skin one month at a time. Three shops, which was a ward. Or one page, which was a man.
He went out through the front and sat down on the sauna steps because the office was warm and he did not want to be warm.
The street was empty. The pawn office sign was off. The fish stall's shutter was down and someone had chained a trolley to it, and beyond that the market row went away into the dark with its awnings strapped for the wind, four hundred metres of shops that were only a ward because of a habit that took men past three doors every morning before nine.
At half past midnight he took his jacket off and laid it beside him on the step.
He rolled up his left sleeve, and looked at the scar across his palm — six years old, thin, not closed, and never had been — and thought about how much of it there was, and where a second cut would have to go so that the Accountant would not have to ask him twice for blood.
The sauna door opened behind him at one o'clock and shut again, and Cheol came down two steps and stopped, and did not sit.
"Hyung."
"Go home."
"Hyung." Cheol's voice had gone somewhere Ji-hoon had only heard it twice before. "Hyung, whatever you're about to do, don't do it with your good arm."