The first slide said HAEMA GROUP — RESTRUCTURING TOWARD A CAPITAL MODEL, and it said it in English.
"For the deck," Jang Ryu explained, cheerfully, to a room in which four men could read it. "The Singapore side prefers English. I'll speak Korean, obviously. Uncle, can you see from there? I can move the screen."
"I can see," Do Man-seok said.
They were in the room with the good chairs, on the second floor above the sauna, which was used for funerals, weddings and the two or three occasions a decade when the Union needed a room that did not have a drain in the floor. Twelve men around a lacquered table. The heating on, for once. A projector on a stack of hymn books borrowed from somewhere.
Jang Ryu was thirty-six and the Chairman's blood nephew, his dead sister's son, and he had spent nine years away doing something with funds and was now back with a very good haircut and an expression of patient goodwill. He did not sit at the head of the table. He stood, which in that room was worse.
Ji-hoon sat three seats down on the left, where he could see the door and the window and most of the faces, and put a notebook in front of him and opened it, because a man who takes notes is a man being helpful.
"Four wards, one terminal, two hundred and eleven earning men," Jang Ryu said. "Last year's consolidated take — and I've had to build this, there were no consolidated figures, which is itself the finding — was nineteen point four billion won. Of which the wards produced twenty-two per cent and consumed thirty-five per cent of costs."
"Consumed," somebody said.
"Consumed. Rent relief, hospital envelopes, tuition, funerals, the New Year distributions, the winter coal. I'm not saying those are wrong. I'm saying nobody has ever written down what they cost." He clicked. "Here they are written down."
Nobody spoke.
"Second finding." Click. "Ritual expenditure. Accountant retainers, clause drafting, reaffirmation fees, house witness fees, and the Ledger house itself, which is a building we own, heat and staff, in a district where the ground is worth what the ground is worth. Two point one billion won a year. Eleven per cent of turnover on — forgive me — documentation."
Ji-hoon wrote documentation in his notebook, and under it, 2.1.
Down the table, Seo Yuna sat with her hands folded on a closed folder and her half-moon glasses pushed up into her hair. She had not opened the folder. She had not, as far as Ji-hoon could tell, blinked in some time.
"Every man in this room has bled into that book," said Ha Won-tae, who ran the northern ward and was fifty-eight. "You have a slide about it."
"I have a slide about the cost of it, uncle. Not about the meaning of it." Jang Ryu said it gently, and he meant it gently, and that was the thing about him: he was not sneering. He had simply arrived from a place where the book did not exist and had not thought to check whether the place he had arrived in was the same place. "Nobody is proposing to stop swearing oaths. I'm proposing we stop paying retail for them."
"How does a man pay wholesale for an oath," Ha Won-tae said.
"Volume drafting. Standard forms. We have four Accountants on retainer writing bespoke clauses for warehouse staff." Click. "One master template, ninety per cent of cases, reviewed annually."
Yuna spoke for the first time, without unfolding her hands.
"May I ask one question, young master?"
"Please."
"Under your master template, when a man is transferred from a ward to the terminal, does his clause go with him, or is it re-executed?"
"It goes with him. That's the point of a standard form." Jang Ryu smiled. "It's portable. That's the efficiency."
"Thank you," Yuna said, and folded her hands again.
Ji-hoon looked at his notebook and kept his face where it was.
He was not an Accountant. He had spent six years around them the way a man who cannot cook spends years in kitchens, and he knew perhaps forty things, and one of the forty was this: a clause does not go with a man. A clause is sworn to a party. Transfer the man, and either the oath is re-sworn to the new party or the old party keeps holding it — which is precisely how a ward man ends up carrying an outside oath to a deputy at Terminal 9, in a car, in the cold, four years ago.
Jang Ryu had just described, as an efficiency, the exact mechanism that had put ink under Ma Jun-oh's ribs on Tuesday night.
And nobody corrected him.
Ha Won-tae did not, because he did not know. The two freight men did not, because they worked for Jang Ryu. Yuna did not, because Yuna charged for corrections and nobody had paid.
Ji-hoon did not, and wrote portable in his notebook, and underlined it once, the way he underlined a number in a noodle shop's account book.
It was, he understood, sitting in a warm room in a good chair, the single most useful thing he had learned all month. Jang Ryu under-read clauses. A man who under-reads clauses will one day sign one, and the day he signs it, the man who read it properly will own him.
That was how Jang Ryu would eventually die, and Ji-hoon knew it in February, in a chair, taking notes.
* * *
"One more thing before the ask." Jang Ryu clicked to a slide that was mostly white space. "Terminal Nine. Fifty-one per cent of turnover, nine per cent of headcount, and no representative in this room today."
"Chief Oh sent word," said one of the freight men. "The tide."
"The tide." Jang Ryu let it sit exactly long enough. "I've asked three times for the terminal's water figures and been given three different documents, all of them handwritten, one of them on the back of a manifest. I'm not accusing anyone of anything. I'm saying that when a business cannot tell me what it moved last month, the business is not being robbed by strangers."
Ji-hoon looked up from his notebook for the first time.
Nobody at that table knew what was under Ma Jun-oh's ribs. Yuna would know by Friday, because Yuna knew everything by Friday, and she would know it as a document. The rest of them knew only that the terminal's figures did not add, and had known it for years, and had assumed it was Oh Dae-su keeping a wide margin for himself, which was the traditional and comfortable explanation.
Ji-hoon wrote three different documents in the notebook and did not underline it.
"So." Jang Ryu closed the laptop halfway and leaned on his knuckles. "I'd like to do a full audit. Ward by ward. Books, envelopes, distributions, and the ritual line. Sixty days."
Man-seok had been sitting through all of it with his forearms on the table and his reading glasses in his hand. He had said nothing for twenty-five minutes. He had a way of being silent that made silence seem like hospitality.
"Whose sixty days?" he said.
"Mine and two people I'd bring in. Accountants of the ordinary kind." A small, self-deprecating smile. "The kind with calculators."
"And you'd want the ward books."
"I'd want the ward books."
The old man turned his glasses over once in his hands.
"Do it," he said.
There was a shift around the table that did not involve anyone moving.
"Thank you, uncle."
"Don't thank me, you'll be sorry by March." Man-seok put the glasses in his shirt pocket. "The wards will give you everything. Anything you ask for, first time, no arguments. I'll say so to all four chiefs myself."
"That's — thank you. That makes it much easier."
"It's not to make it easier." Man-seok stood up, and his chair went back with the particular sound of a chair that has been pushed by a heavy man. "Sixty days. Bring me what you find. All of it. I'd rather know."
He went out.
He did not look at Ji-hoon on the way past. He had not looked at Ji-hoon once in twenty-five minutes, which for a man who had put his hand on the back of Ji-hoon's neck in a courtyard three nights ago was itself a sentence, delivered.
No hand raised in my house goes unanswered. Ji-hoon had never entirely worked out what the Long Arm covered — whether an audit was a hand raised, whether a slide deck was — but he had long since stopped assuming the old man did not know a thing, and had started assuming instead that Man-seok knew everything and was waiting, with enormous patience, to see who would say it to his face.
The audit was not permission.
The audit was a room with a door left open in it, and Ji-hoon had just been told, by an old man who had not looked at him, to walk past it.
* * *
Jang Ryu caught him at the stairs.
"Chief Kang. Two minutes. Can I be a nuisance?"
They stood at the window on the half-landing, where the glass was cold and you could see the market row and, past the rooftops, the cranes at the container terminal standing in the haze like something left over from a bigger city.
"I want to start with Myeongho," Jang Ryu said.
"You'll enjoy it. My book is very boring."
"Your book is the most interesting one, which is why." He said it pleasantly. "Eleven per cent quarter on quarter, in a district with falling footfall. Every other ward is flat or down. If I can understand what you do, I can write it down, and if I can write it down I can put it into the other three wards and this whole conversation stops being about cuts."
"What I do is walk."
"Everybody says that."
"Then it must be true."
Jang Ryu laughed. He had a good laugh; that was the irritating part. "My uncle is sixty-one and he cooks for thirty men four times a year and knows their mothers' names, and every man down there would open a vein for him. I'm not sentimental about it — I'm telling you it is worth money. That's not a cynical statement. It is a statement that the thing you people call loyalty appears in the numbers, and I can see it in the numbers, and nobody has ever priced it."
"You've priced it at two point one billion."
"That's the book. The book isn't loyalty. The book is a compliance overhead we've dressed in a shirt." Jang Ryu turned to face him. "Look. Everyone in that room thinks I came back to take the house off an old man. I came back because the house has eleven years left in it and nobody has said that out loud. The ports are being automated. The market row is being bought street by street by people who wear worse suits than mine. In eleven years there will be no envelope business in Myeongho-dong, and we will either be a fund by then or we will be nine old men with a warm book."
He let that sit. Then, easily:
"I'd want you on the winning side. I'm saying it plainly because people like you get approached in riddles and I think it's disrespectful. Whatever Uncle names in December, there's a version of this house where you run half of it. I'd be glad of that. I'd be glad of it selfishly."
The copper in Ji-hoon's mouth did not move. Every word of it was true.
That was worse than if it had not been.
He had perhaps a second and a half. He could say nothing, and nothing is an answer. He could decline, and a declined man is a man on a list. He could accept, and Man-seok was one floor below in a building where hands raised get answered.
"You're the first man in this house to say eleven years out loud," Ji-hoon said. "I've been waiting three years for somebody to say a number."
Both halves true. Neither half his.
Jang Ryu's face opened like a door.
"Thank you," he said. "God. Thank you. That's — I'll take that."
He put his hand out and Ji-hoon shook it, on a half-landing, in a window where the whole market row could see two men shaking hands if the whole market row had been looking up, and somewhere in the building below them was an old man who could feel a hand raised anywhere in his house and had spent thirty years choosing when to notice.
Ji-hoon had joined a faction he had no intention of joining, in nine words, none of them false.
He went down the stairs. Jang Ryu came after him, cheerful, gathering his coat, already somewhere else.
"Myeongho first," he said, snapping the laptop bag shut. "Nothing personal. Uncle loves your ward, and audits should start where the love is."