Do Man-seok tasted the braise off the back of a spoon, made a face, and reached for the sugar.
"Too sharp," he said. "Somebody put the pear in late."
"I put the pear in late," said the young man at his elbow, wretched.
"I know you did. I'm not asking, I'm telling you why it's sharp." The Chairman of the Haema Union tipped a palmful of brown sugar into a pot the size of a washing machine and stirred it with a wooden paddle he had brought from his own kitchen. "Pear goes in at the start, with the water and the fire off. It's not seasoning, it's a tool. It takes the meat apart for you so you don't have to cook it for four hours and turn it into soup. Do you see?"
"Yes, Chairman."
"Say it back to me in the spring when you do it again."
The courtyard behind the sauna was twelve metres square and had two gas rings, a tap, a persimmon tree that had not fruited since the nineties, and, tonight, thirty men standing around in the cold with their coats on and their collars up, waiting to be fed.
Ji-hoon stood at the wall with his hands in his pockets and watched an old man in a cardigan with the sleeves pushed to the elbow correct a boy's grip on a knife.
"Not like that. You're holding it like a pen. You'll cut through your own nail and then you'll be no good to me for a month and your mother will telephone me." Man-seok took the knife, laid the boy's fingers along the blade's spine with his own hand over them, and let go. "There. Now the knife is doing the work. Slower."
"Yes, Chairman."
"Your mother's knee. Did it get better?"
The boy blinked. "It — she had the injection."
"Injections are nothing. She needs to walk on it. Tell her I said so, and tell her I said it in front of people." He went back to his pot. "Twenty minutes!"
Sixty-one years old, built like a door, forearms like a butcher's. He cooked for his men four or five times a year and it was not a gesture, because a gesture can be delegated and this could not: he shopped for it himself at six in the morning, he argued with the vendors himself, and by ten he was carrying his own bags up the market row while men who would have killed for him walked empty-handed beside him because he would not let them take the bags.
Ji-hoon had worked out in his second year what this was. It was not warmth used as a tool. It was warmth, genuinely, and it was also a tool, and Do Man-seok had never once in his life felt the two things pulling in different directions.
That was the part the police file had never managed to say.
* * *
They ate on plastic stools and upturned crates, in the cold, out of steel bowls, under a string of bulbs somebody had hung between the persimmon tree and the drainpipe.
The ribs were very good. The rice was better than the ribs. There was a dish of pickled radish that three separate men identified out loud as having come from the shop on Sinheung-ro, and they were right, and Man-seok told them the price he had paid and two men said he had been robbed and one man said he had been robbed and should be grateful.
Reports came after the second round of soju, in no particular order, the way they always did. Somebody's stall dispute in the east. A pachinko parlour that wanted to reopen. The Chairman listened with his bowl in his hand, asked three questions of every man, and remembered every one of their mothers' names, including the dead ones — including, Ji-hoon noticed, Ma Jun-ho's mother, who had died in 2009 and whom Man-seok mentioned by her given name, which nobody had done in the man's hearing for fifteen years. Ma Jun-ho looked at his rice for a while after that.
"Myeongho," Man-seok said.
Ji-hoon put his bowl down.
"Collections up eleven per cent on the quarter. Not because the rates moved — the rates didn't move. Two new shops on the western row, one dumpling place and one phone repair, both paying from month two." He said it flatly. Numbers were the register the old man liked to be loved in. "Complaints down. Four last quarter, one this quarter, and the one was a man complaining that Ma Jun-ho parks across his door, which he does."
Laughter around the crates. Ma Jun-ho raised his cup with dignity.
"The landlord on Sinheung-ro tried to move two tenants out to sell the building above the market. The fish shop and the stationer's. Twenty-two years and thirty-one years in those units." Ji-hoon shrugged slightly. "The building didn't sell."
"Why not?" Man-seok asked, who knew exactly why not.
"The buyer heard that the tenants were difficult."
"From whom?"
"From me. I told him the truth about them," Ji-hoon said. "They are extremely difficult. The stationer has sued two landlords. I gave him the case numbers."
The courtyard liked that. Man-seok laughed with his whole chest, one hand flat on his knee, and pointed the wooden paddle at him.
"You see this. This is the difference." He said it to the yard, not to Ji-hoon. "Thirty years ago we'd have broken the man's car. Then he sells anyway, and the fish shop is gone, and we've got a broken car and no fish shop. This one gives him a reading list."
"Cheaper," Ji-hoon said.
"It's not cheaper. It's slower and it's more work and you have to know what a case number is." Man-seok scraped the bottom of his bowl. "It's better. Say the true word."
"It's better."
The old man nodded, satisfied, and went for more rice.
And Ji-hoon sat in the cold with a warm bowl and thirty men around him, and noticed — the way you notice a step that is not where you expected it — that he had been pleased.
Not relieved. Not covered. Pleased. Some ordinary animal part of him had put its ears up when the old man said it was better in front of the yard, and had stayed up.
He filed the observation the way he filed everything, in the same place, with the same care, and did not look at it again.
The copper sat in his mouth under the taste of the meat, the way it always did, saying nothing in particular.
* * *
When the second pot went on, Man-seok waved him over to the gas rings.
"Hold that."
Ji-hoon held the tray while the old man lifted ribs out of the braise with a pair of tongs and laid them in rows, three high, turning each one so the good side faced up. It took a while. Nobody else was allowed to do it.
"The Kwon boy," Man-seok said. "He went to the book?"
"Yesterday. A rider. Four hundred, of which eighty was punctuation."
"She charged eighty thousand won for a comma."
"A semicolon."
"Of course. A comma would be two hundred." Man-seok turned a rib. "He'll be all right?"
"He'll be careful for a year and stupid again after that."
"That's all right. Careful for a year is what a year is for." The tongs paused. "Whose fault was the bus shelter?"
"His. The woman's husband put a hand on her in the street first, which is why nobody in the ward will say anything about it, including me, and I'm saying it to you now so that you heard it from me."
Man-seok grunted, which meant filed.
"The house pays for a signing," he said. "It has never once paid for a rider. The rider is the boy's."
"That's the rule."
"That's the rule. Yuna's card says the four hundred was settled on the day." Man-seok laid another row down, not looking up. "A boy of twenty-three does not have four hundred thousand won on the day. So either you have made him a debtor to you, which would be clever, or you paid it and told nobody, which would be expensive."
Ji-hoon adjusted the tray a centimetre.
"Kwon Do-yeong owes the house nothing and owes me nothing," he said, which was true, and was not an answer to the question.
"No," Man-seok agreed pleasantly. "He doesn't."
He took the tray back and carried it to the crates himself.
* * *
Man-seok came past on his way to the tap and stopped behind him, and put his hand on the back of Ji-hoon's neck.
It was not a pat. It was not a squeeze. He simply rested a broad, hot, dry hand across the back of Ji-hoon's neck the way a man puts his hand on a gate post he has owned for forty years, and stood there for three or four seconds while he said something to somebody else about the weather.
Then he took it away and went to wash the paddle.
Ji-hoon ate his rice.
He had seen that gesture perhaps six times in six years. Twice it had gone to men who were about to be promoted. Once to a man who had been sent to Busan for two years and had come back all right. Once to a man who had not come back at all.
It was not a decision being announced. It was a decision having been made, by a man who would not be saying what it was.
Cheol dropped onto the crate beside him with two bowls and a face full of meat.
"He touched your neck," Cheol said.
"He did."
"Hyung." Cheol's voice went up. "He touched your—"
"Eat the other one," Ji-hoon said, "before Ma sees it."
* * *
It came at the end, mildly, in the lull when men are full and the fire is down and everybody is thinking about the taxi.
Man-seok was sitting on the step with his sleeves still pushed up, talking about garlic.
"Three hundred a head at Sinheung-ro. Three hundred! I said to her, auntie, I was buying garlic from your mother when it was ninety, and she said to me, Chairman, and I was buying rice from your father at four hundred, and now look." He shook his head. "She's right. Everybody's right about prices. It's the only subject where everybody is right."
Somebody refilled his cup. He let them.
"Before the new year," he said, in the same voice, "I'll give the house a name. My successor. It'll be settled and written before the holiday, and then we'll have a dinner about it, and I'll cook the same thing because I'm old and I can only cook four things."
He drank.
"Garlic'll be four hundred by then," he said. "Mark it."
It was very quiet in the courtyard.
The string of bulbs buzzed. Somewhere past the wall a delivery bike went down the alley with its exhaust taped up, and the sound of it went on for a long time.
Thirty men looked at their bowls.
Ji-hoon did not look at his bowl. He had spent six years learning that the two seconds after a thing is said are the only honest seconds available, and he used them.
He counted the ones who looked at the Chairman.
Twenty-two men, roughly. The ward collectors, the sauna men, the two brothers who ran the gambling floor, old Ma, the boy who had held the knife wrong. They looked at Man-seok the way men look at their own weather — waiting, worried, without a plan, because they did not have one and had never needed one.
Then he counted the ones who looked at each other.
Seven.
Two of them were port men, down from Terminal 9 for the meal, and one of those was Pyo Gi-taek's driver. Two were from the freight office that Jang Ryu had been reorganising since October. One was a book-runner who had been on the Chairman's own door for four years. One was a man Ji-hoon did not know at all, sitting at the end of the wall in a very good coat.
And the seventh was Kwon Do-yeong, twenty-three, hand still bandaged from a table in a converted bathhouse eleven days into the copper taste, who looked across the yard at the man in the very good coat, and then away, fast, the way you look away from a teacher.
Seven men, and every one of them worked for somebody else.
Man-seok stood up, groaning, and clapped his hands twice.
"Wash your own bowls," he said. "I'm the Chairman, not your mother."
And thirty men got up and began, very carefully, to talk about nothing at all.