One hundred thousand won, in a plain white envelope, under a name that was not his.
Ji-hoon wrote it at the fold-out table inside the door of the funeral hall, where the register lay open and a boy in an ill-fitting black suit waited to take the envelope with both hands. The pen was a cheap one on a string. He wrote Noh Sang-gi in a hand that leaned differently from his own, and under it, in the column for relation, market acquaintance, and he made the strokes slowly, because a man writing a false name quickly is a man who has practised.
He had chosen the name in the car. It had to be one he could keep for the rest of his life: belonging to nobody, sounding like somebody's uncle, and able to survive being said aloud in a room where he might one day be recognised.
"Thank you for coming," the boy said.
"He was good to me," Ji-hoon said, which was true, and let the boy decide what it meant.
Room 3 held about forty people and smelled of chrysanthemums, steamed rice and the floor wax they used in places where people cried on the floor. At the front, the photograph: Im Gwang-sik at perhaps forty-five, in a suit he had been told to wear, looking at the camera with the expression of a man being delayed. Below it the casket, closed, with a spray of white across the lid arranged to cover as much of it as possible.
Ji-hoon bowed twice, and then to the family, and stayed down the correct fraction of a second longer than a market acquaintance would.
The widow was small and upright and had the dry, competent look of a woman in the second day of it, past weeping and into administration. Her son, perhaps nineteen, knelt beside her with his hands on his knees and his jaw set so hard it must have hurt.
"Noh Sang-gi," she repeated. "I'm sorry. He didn't talk about work."
"He didn't talk about anything," Ji-hoon said. "It was restful."
She laughed — one breath of it, out of a face that had not expected to — and put her hand briefly over her mouth, and looked at him properly for the first time.
"You knew him well, then."
"I knew him a long time."
Not the same thing. She heard the first and not the second, which was the arrangement he had made with the sentence before he said it.
"They told us it was the brakes," she said. "The vehicle was fifteen years old. He wouldn't spend money on it. I told him. For four years I told him."
There was no copper. She believed it. Somebody had sat in her kitchen and handed her that, and she had taken it, and she would keep it for the rest of her life like a tin behind the rice sacks.
"Fifteen years is a long time for a car," Ji-hoon said, and bowed again, and went to sit on the floor at the back with a paper cup of soju he did not intend to drink.
* * *
He counted the room.
Colleagues came in sets and sat in sets. The uniformed ones stayed forty minutes and left together. The plainclothes stayed longer, drank harder, and talked about a transfer list. There was a nephew doing the rounds with the soup.
And there were two men by the pillar who did not fit any set.
They were the right age and the wrong stillness. Neither had signed the register. They had put themselves where they could see the door, the family and the corridor to the toilets, which was three good things and one more than a mourner needs. They poured for each other and did not drink.
Ji-hoon took his cup and went and stood near them, the way a man who has been sitting on the floor for an hour stands to unlock his knees.
"Terrible thing," he said, to no one.
The older of the two glanced at him. Late forties, flat nose, a wedding ring worn thin. "Terrible."
"You were in his section?"
"We worked with him."
"Then you'd know." Ji-hoon rolled the cup between his palms. "There's a collection going for the boy's tuition. The section's putting in. I said I'd add to it, but I didn't want to insult the family by putting in above his rank, and I never could keep the ranks straight. He was — what, in the end?"
A pause of about one second. It was a very small pause.
"Senior," the man said.
"Senior Inspector?"
"That's right."
Copper, sharp and sudden, arriving in Ji-hoon's mouth half a beat before the words did, like a coin pressed to the tongue. Im Gwang-sik had been an Inspector for eleven years and had made a small, bitter joke of it every time they met.
"That's what I thought," Ji-hoon said. "Thank you. I'll put in accordingly."
He bowed to them, the shallow one you give strangers, and went back to the floor, and did not look at them again for the remaining twenty minutes he stayed, which was the hardest piece of work he did that day.
Men sent to mourn know the rank. Men sent to watch know the face.
They had not reacted to his. So they had been given the family, the register and the door — and not a photograph of Kang Ji-hoon. Somebody was watching who came to this room, and that somebody did not yet know to be watching for him.
That was the whole of the good news, and he carried it out to the car park like a man carrying water in his hands.
* * *
Cheol was in the driver's seat with the engine off and the window down, smoking, because Cheol believed that smoking in a closed car was disrespectful to the car.
"Long one," he said.
"Old people talk."
"You know I could have come in."
"You're wearing a purple shirt."
"It's aubergine," Cheol said, wounded. "It's for funerals."
Ji-hoon got in. "Take me to the market. Then go home. I don't need you after nine."
"Since when."
"Since tonight."
Cheol turned in the seat, all two metres of him folded around the wheel, and looked at him with the particular patience that was the most dangerous thing about him. Cheol was loud so that people would stop looking.
"Hyung. Whose funeral was that?"
"A man I used to know from the market side," Ji-hoon said. "He drank in Myeongho for years. He was decent to me when nobody had a reason to be."
Every word of it true. He had met Im Gwang-sik in a market-side office over instant coffee at twenty-eight years old, and Im had been decent to him, and nobody had had any reason to be.
Cheol nodded slowly, satisfied — and then, without warning, the thing happened that always happened without warning.
Cheol's eyes lost their focus for perhaps two seconds. His head came around a few degrees to the left, following nothing, the way a man tracks a bird that is not there. It was subtle. Ji-hoon had had six years to learn to recognise it, and it still went through him like cold water down a collar.
I will not look away from my brother. That was the oath, and this was its shadow: at moments neither of them chose, Baek Cheol saw what Ji-hoon saw.
Ji-hoon turned his head and looked at the passenger-side wing mirror, at the funeral hall's lit sign, at nothing that meant anything, and thought carefully about the price of garlic.
Two seconds. Then Cheol blinked, rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand, and grinned as though he had sneezed.
"Sorry. It does that."
"It does."
"It never shows me anything good. Last week it was your shoes for a whole minute."
"Go home at nine," Ji-hoon said.
* * *
The district impound yard was chain-link and sodium light behind the western district station, and at four in the morning it had one man in the gatehouse watching a drama with the sound up.
Ji-hoon did not go through the gate. He went over the back fence where the ivy had pulled the mesh loose from the post — a gap he had found on a map of the yard that he had read three years ago for entirely different reasons, and had never expected to use.
The car was in the third row with a tag wired to the door pillar.
He had expected it to be bad to look at. It was worse to think about.
He crouched at the driver's side and worked from the outside in, the way Im had taught him in a rented room with a whiteboard, a lifetime ago. Don't ask what happened. Ask what the fire wanted.
The engine block was barely scorched. The paint on the bonnet had blistered in two places and held everywhere else. There was still rubber on the front tyres, cracked and grey, but rubber.
The cabin was a shell. The seat frames were bare — not burned, annealed, the springs slumped and dull where the steel had been taken past the temperature at which it forgets its shape. The window glass had gone out, not in. What was left of the headlining was a fine grey ash that moved when he breathed.
A fuel line fire starts at the engine and is pushed backwards. It eats the bay, the bulkhead, the wiring, and arrives in the cabin late, tired and full of smoke.
This car had burned from the seats outward.
He stayed there a long time, on his heels, hands hanging between his knees, in the smell of wet char. He could not make himself put his hand inside the cabin. He was not squeamish; he had put his hands in worse. The space was simply still shaped like a man.
One man, one paper, one safe, Im had said in the rain, looking straight ahead.
"You were right," Ji-hoon said, out loud, to a burned car, in a yard, at four in the morning. "That's the part that's going to be difficult."
Then he took the photographs he had come for with a disposable camera bought at a convenience store two districts away, and went back over the fence, and drove to an apartment block in Wonmi-dong where a dead man's tape was still across the door.
* * *
The tape was intact. He was almost disappointed by how easy it was to make it intact again afterwards.
The apartment was two rooms and a kitchen and a balcony full of pickle jars. A widower's flat, except Im had not been a widower; he had simply lived like one four nights a week, which Ji-hoon had known and had never once thought about until he stood in it.
The dust told the story before anything else did. It lay evenly across the top of the television, across the lampshade, across the window ledge — and it lay in a broken, smeared way along the edges of every shelf, every drawer front, the top of the wardrobe, the underside of the kitchen table. Somebody had been through the entire flat and had been careful about fingerprints and careless about dust, which meant gloves, and which meant a professional who had never been a housekeeper.
The family had been through too: photo albums stacked by the door, a suit on a hanger hooked over the frame, a carrier bag of medicines. Grief takes things out and does not put them back.
The books had been put back.
Two shelves of them, above the desk, and every one squared to the edge and standing in order — Korean alphabetical, author by author, tight as a stationery display.
Im Gwang-sik had shelved by height. He had said so, with feeling, more than once: A book you can find is a book somebody else can find.
So they had taken the books down, one by one, and shaken them out, and put them back the way a tidy stranger puts books back. Which told Ji-hoon that they had been looking for paper, and that paper was the only thing they had been looking for.
He stood in the middle of the room and did what he had done in the alley two nights before, because it was the only thing he was good at: he counted.
A wall safe, open, empty, not forced. A desk with its drawers in the wrong order. No notebooks. No diaries. No copies. A man who kept one paper in one safe, and the safe was at the station, and the station now belonged to Superintendent Han Jeong-gu.
They had done it well. They had done it so well that the flat was, as of tonight, a clean room — nothing in it that could say Kang Ji-hoon had ever been anything but what he appeared to be.
He was at the door with his hand on the light switch when he turned back and looked at the kitchen, because of a thing Im had said once, in a car park, with no particular emphasis: Professionals search where a thing would be kept. Search where a thing would be forgotten.
The rice cooker was on the counter, unplugged, half full of rice gone hard and grey.
Ji-hoon lifted the lid and turned it over.
Taped inside it, flat, folded twice, was a strip of photocopy paper: the corner of a document, cut down to the size of a train ticket. A case number, a date, and the header of an operational order.
He knew the number. He had never seen it written down. It had been said to him aloud, once, in a rented room with a whiteboard, by a man who had told him to memorise it and never write it anywhere.
He held it up to the kitchen window, and the sodium light came through the paper, and he saw the ghost of it — the grey band down the left edge, the faint doubled shadow at the crop.
It was not a copy of the order.
It was a copy of a copy.
Someone else had photocopied it first.