The recording ran for eleven minutes and forty seconds, and Mr. Lim played it twice.
He did it in the glass-walled meeting room on the thirty-fourth floor of the Daon building in Yeouido, at ten past ten on Tuesday morning, with the winter sun coming flat across the Han and the investment committee of the Daon Pension Fund sitting in a half circle round a long pale table with their reading glasses on. There were seven of them. Hajin sat at the end, at Mr. Lim's invitation, as a guest, with his hands folded and a cup of barley tea going cold at his elbow. He had been told that he might leave. He had said that he would prefer to stay.
A woman's voice came out of a small black speaker in the middle of the table. It was warm and quick and a little breathless, and it was so pleasant to listen to that he saw two of the older members, before they knew it, begin to smile.
*Mr. Lim, I am so sorry to trouble you again. I only wished to say that I think we have all been rather unfair to Mr. Yoon. He is such a gifted young man. It is only that he has had such a hard time, and I do worry that he is not quite himself. I thought that Daon, as a long-term holder, ought to know that he may not be, ah, entirely reliable in his judgement at present. I should hate for your members to be exposed.*
*I should be grateful if you could tell me what you intend to do on the ninth. I am only asking so that I can help.*
The tape ran on. It was very kind. It was all of it kind. There was a long, gentle, anxious passage about the pressure that a person is under when he has been publicly embarrassed, and a small sorrowful aside about the cruelty of the press, and a phrase, *I would not for the world say a word against him*, that was repeated, with slight variations, four times. Mr. Lim let it run to the end. Then he pressed a key, and the speaker clicked, and he laid his hand flat on the table.
"I have been in this chair for twenty-two years," he said. "I have been telephoned by a great many people who wished me to remember a great many things. I should like to say that I have never before been so thoroughly told what to think by a person who assured me that she was only asking."
There was a small dry laugh from the end of the table.
"Mr. Yoon," said Mr. Lim, "the committee has voted. We were five to two. It is our intention, if the Board of Seol Education proceeds on Saturday without hearing evidence touching the integrity of the Fund's records, to join with Maru Learning in a requisition under Article 12 for a general meeting of shareholders. We hold two point four. You hold nine. It is eleven point four, and I am advised that it is enough."
"I am grateful."
"Do not be." The heavy face did not alter. "We are doing it because it is our duty. We are not doing it because we like you. I should like to be quite clear. I have found that I do like you. It is not a thing that I allow to affect my vote."
Hajin bowed to him, and found, to his surprise, that he was smiling.
Chairman Pyo had a second pot of tea waiting for him on Wednesday morning.
It stood on the low lacquer table in the room on the twenty-eighth floor, in the soft light of the paper screens, on the same black tray, beside the same two celadon cups, with the iron kettle steaming on the brazier. The scroll of calligraphy hung on the wall behind it, four feet wide, in a hand so assured that he still could not read it. The old man rose when Hajin entered. He was in a dove-grey suit, silver-haired, upright, unhurried. He gave a very small bow, a degree and a half, and gestured to a cushion.
"Mr. Yoon. You are punctual. I had not hoped that you would come."
"You were kind to ask."
"I am often kind. It is a habit, and a strategy, and I have never been able to tell them apart." Pyo knelt and began to pour with both hands. "I imagine that you have come to refuse the chair a second time."
"Yes."
He said it plainly, with his hands on his knees, and the old man's hand did not falter on the pot. The tea went into the cup in a thin steady stream. The scent of roasted rice rose between them, and something much older and stranger.
"I should like to say why," said Hajin. "I think that you will find it useless. I should like to say it anyway."
"Please."
"It is a very good chair. I have wanted it for ten years, or I thought that I had. I find that what I wanted was to be asked what I would like to eat." He stopped. He had not planned the sentence, and it sat oddly in the quiet room. "Chairman, you have offered me a seat twice, with a pot of tea, and have not once asked me what I thought. I do not blame you. I have been given a great many chairs this winter. Not one of them was given to me. They were given to the vote."
Pyo set down the pot.
He sat with his hands folded on his knee and looked at the young man across the lacquer for a very long time, with the dry bright patience of a person who has spent forty years reading what men do not say. Then he did something that Hajin had not expected. He laughed. It was a short dry sound, very quiet, and it shook the silver head.
"The vote," said Pyo. "Yes. I should have said it better myself."
"I have not come to ask you for your vote. You have it, I think, for your own reasons."
"I have it for the reasons of an old man who does not like to see the Chairwoman's table taken by a division that can draw a pie chart." Pyo lifted his cup. "I do not pretend that they are noble. What do you ask?"
"Three things. I should like to ask for the first place on Saturday's agenda for a matter that I shall call the integrity of the Fund's records. I should like the Steward to be heard on it, though she cannot vote. And I should like the Commission's secretariat to be invited to attend as an observer."
"It is irregular."
"Attorney Cha tells me that it is permitted."
"Attorney Cha tells me a great many things that are permitted. I have found that it is the least of his virtues." Pyo drank. "And if I should say that it is irregular?"
"I shall not threaten you," said Hajin.
It came out so mildly that for a moment the old man did not seem to hear. He sat with the cup against his lip.
"I should like to tell you what I shall do, and what it will cost, on either road, and then you may decide. I have learned a thing this winter, from a woman who is a great deal braver than I. It is that one may say what one needs without making it a blade." He drew breath. "If the Board hears the evidence on Saturday, I shall vote as I think right, and we shall all go home, and I shall be a good deal less useful to your party than you hoped. If the Board does not, on Sunday morning Maru and Daon will lodge a requisition under Article 12 for a general meeting in March, with the evidence attached, and the Commission will be sent a copy of the lot. The press will have it by the afternoon. It will not be kind to anybody who was seen not to listen."
He stopped.
"That is all," said Hajin. "I should like you to know that I am sorry to have said it in a tea room."
Pyo set down his cup. He did it very gently, and sat looking at it for some time.
"I am old," he said, "but I am not blind."
"No."
"I drafted the minute, in 1994, that removed Seol Jaehyun from the succession schedule." The silver head did not lift. "It was a correct minute. It followed the articles. It was also the least kind thing that I have ever written, and I wrote it because I was asked, by a person whose name I shall not give you, and because I wished to be of use to the family." His mouth moved. "I have thought of it a great many times. A boy of thirty, with a young wife, who sat in the corridor outside that room for four hours and was not called in. I walked past him twice."
Hajin did not say anything.
"I do not tell you so that you will pity him. I tell you so that when I say that I shall hear your evidence, you will know that I do not do it for love of you." Pyo raised his eyes. They were grey and dry and very tired. "I shall hear Mr. Ma and the Principal privately on Thursday. I shall put your matter first. I shall invite the Commission. And I shall ask you, in return, one thing."
"Please."
"When it is done, I should like to be told what the girl's father did. I should not like to hear it from the newspaper."
"You shall," said Hajin.
The old man lifted the pot, and filled his cup again, and then, with unexpected formality, filled the other. "Drink it," said Chairman Pyo. "It is a vanity. It is also very good."
She was waiting in the lobby.
He saw her from the lift, through the long glass of the cage, as one sees a figure in an aquarium: small, in an oatmeal coat, at the end of the marble hall by the security counter, with her hands folded in front of her and her face lifted to an old man in a navy jacket who was telling her something that she found enchanting. It was Mr. Gu. He was talking about his daughter. Hajin could see it in the way the old man's hands moved, wide, to show the size of a thing, and the way that the girl nodded, and laughed, and put one hand on his sleeve.
Then she saw him, and turned her face, and it lit.
"Hajin!" She crossed the marble in a quick light run, with her coat flying open, and stopped a pace in front of him, a little breathless, her cheeks pink and her eyes enormous. "I have been standing here for forty minutes. Mr. Gu has been so kind. I did not wish to telephone and have you say no, because you would not say no to a face."
"Yurim."
"I wanted to see you before Saturday. That is all. I am not going to ask you for anything." She said it quickly, and with such perfect frankness that he had the old uneasy sense of being a swimmer, pleasantly drawn. "I only wished you to know that I am frightened. I have not said so to anyone. I do not think that anyone has noticed."
It was true. He knew that it was true. It was in the faint shake of her hands, in the white shadow round her mouth. He looked at it, and found, with a cold small shock, that it hurt.
"Halmoni is to come home on Friday," said Yurim. "Did you know? She told Nurse Baek and not me. I only heard from the housekeeper. She would not see me yesterday. I took her an orchid, and she turned her face to the wall." Her eyes filled, quite suddenly, and she wiped them with the heel of her hand. "I have done nothing but love her. I have been so careful to be good to her. I cannot think what I have done."
"I am sorry that you are unhappy."
"You are always so kind." She laid her fingers on his sleeve, lightly, as she had on a day in October. "Will you have dinner with me on Thursday? There is a little place in Hannam. We shall not talk about it. We shall only eat."
He looked at the fingers.
They were small, and warm, and quite steady, and he thought of a packet of tissues on a cold stair, and of a girl in a pale ribbon who had been kind to him in a terrible week. It was a thing that had happened. It had been real, and it was true, and it lay beside the other thing without touching it, like two papers on a counter. He did not know what she was. He thought that perhaps she did not either.
"No," said Hajin.
He said it gently. He took her hand from his sleeve, and did not drop it at once. He held it between his own, a moment, as one holds a thing that one does not mean to keep.
"I shall see you on Saturday," he said. "I should like to say what I think to your face, as I said. I shall do it in front of everyone, and I shall try to be kind. I do not know whether I shall manage."
Her face did not change. It did the other thing. It went quite still, as the surface of a pond goes still when something has gone down through it, and then, from behind it, a half beat late, the smile came up. It was small and sorrowful and a little crooked. It was the longest one that he had ever measured, and he did not count it.
"I shall sit next to you," said Yurim.
"I think that you will have your own chair," said Hajin.
She took her hand away. She stood with it against her coat, and looked at him for a long moment with an expression that he could not read, and then she turned, and walked away across the marble toward the revolving door, small and straight in her oatmeal coat. At the security counter she stopped. She said something to Mr. Gu, and he bowed. She went out. It had begun, a little, to snow.
Mr. Gu watched her go. Then he turned his head and looked, across the width of the lobby, at Hajin, and gave him a slow, creased, entirely noncommittal nod, as one acknowledges a fellow guard of a very long gate.
Mr. Ma exported the logs at five.
He did it in the Fund's records office on the eighteenth floor, at the terminal in the corner, with his lanyard round his neck and his thin anxious face lit blue from below, and Hajin stood behind him and watched. It took twenty minutes. Each file was copied, and sealed, and given a long string of letters and numbers that Mr. Ma read aloud, in a whisper, as a man reads the names of the dead. Taewon stood against the wall with the ring-binder under his arm. Attorney Cha, who had come up in the lift and said nothing, stood at the window with his hands behind him.
"The hash is recorded in three places," said Mr. Ma, at last, in a voice that cracked on the last word. "With the Commission's secretariat. In Attorney Cha's safe. And in a sealed envelope that I have given to Dr. Ko, who put it in a hard black case, and said that she should not let go of it in an aeroplane." He lifted his hands from the keys. "It cannot be altered now. Whatever is done on that account, it will not change what is here."
"Thank you, Mr. Ma."
"I should like to say," said Mr. Ma, "that I have been afraid of this account for three months. I find that I am not afraid of it today."
Hajin took out his telephone.
He did not send it. He stood in the middle of the records office with the telephone in his hand and, after a moment, held it out to the woman at the window. She had come in with Cha, quietly, a few minutes before, in her charcoal coat, with her glasses on, and had said nothing.
"The notice is drafted," said Hajin. "It is Ms. Park's. It suspends the delegated access of the acting member on the pilot's joint account under Section 11.2, for the breach of Section 6 that the Commission has already minuted. It does not mention the sixteenth floor, or the thirtieth, or a rabbit. It says only that a filing was made without circulation. It is true, and it is dull, and it is within our rights." He kept his voice quite level. "It will tell her that we have noticed. I do not think that it will tell her what. I should like to ask whether you agree that we should send it."
Ahreum took the telephone and read it. She read it slowly, to the end, with the corner of her thumb against the seam of her cuff.
"The Fund's side requires my countersignature," she said.
"Yes."
"It will warn her."
"A little."
"It is also correct," said Ahreum. "I do not think that it is a trap. A trap would not be minuted." She lifted her eyes. "I should like to leave the account open until the ninth, so that she may go on thinking that it is hers. And I should like to do the other thing. I should like to do what is plainly right, and not what is clever." She drew breath. "Yes. Send it."
He sent it at twenty-eight minutes to six. Attorney Cha, at the window, said nothing at all, but he took off his glasses, and polished them, for rather longer than the lenses required.
They worked on Thursday as two people work who have decided to be friends.
It was a thing that he had not expected, and it was the best part of the week. She had a room on the twenty-second floor and he had one on the fourteenth, and they used neither. They took the little conference room with the pale ash table and the window onto the roofs of Jongno, and laid out the plan on a single sheet, in two hands, hers in grey and his in red, and divided it as one divides a loaf.
"I shall telephone Mr. Lim and the Chairman," said Hajin. "I have a way with men who pour tea."
"I shall telephone Principal Moon, Mr. Ma, Attorney Cha and Dr. Ko." She wrote it down. "Who shall record?"
"You. Your writing is clearer."
"Mine is smaller. Yours is angrier." She did not look up. "I like it. It is easier to find."
He felt his ears go warm, and was grateful that she was looking at the page.
It was a pleasant, absurd, wholly new thing. He had never in his life worked with anyone without a hierarchy. He telephoned Mr. Lim, who was courteous, and the Chairman's secretary, who was not. She telephoned the Principal, who said *Yes, Director, yes, I have written it,* and Mr. Ma, who said *Yes, Director* before she had finished. At noon they ate rice cakes out of a paper bag, in silence, and at one she took out the little black notebook with two columns and wrote, and he looked at the window, and did not read it.
*Item twenty-four. His. I said what I should do and what it would cost, to an old man in a tea room, and did not make it a blade. I do not think that I did it well. I did it.*
She turned the book round, and slid it across the ash.
*Item twenty-four. Hers. Noted. It was well done. I should like it entered that it was.*
He looked at it for a very long time.
Taewon came at nine in the evening with the ring-binder and a paper bag, and sat on the edge of the ash table with his tie over his shoulder, and said, in the tone of a man reading out a weather report:
"Seongjin Partners replied at six."
They both turned.
"Attorney Cha served the instruction on Monday, by hand, with a copy of the deed. It is a very old firm. They have a senior partner called Gwon who is eighty years old, and who drew up the Samil deed in 1987 at Mr. Seol's kitchen table, and who has not been in the office on a Saturday since 1999." He took out a folded letter. "He has replied in his own hand. I shall read it. *To Attorney Cha. The instruction of the settlor is received and is in order. I have kept the schedule in my own safe for thirty-seven years. I have not opened it, because no person with the right to ask has asked. I shall bring it myself to the Board on the ninth, in the presence of the Commission, as she has directed. I should like it to be known that I have been waiting for this telephone call for a very long time.*"
Nobody spoke.
"He did not say who," said Taewon. "He would not. But the clerk who took the call, a girl called Moon, no relation, told Mr. Ma's cousin, who is in Compliance, that in the last month the firm had received two telephone calls from the Strategy division, asking whether the beneficiary schedule was ever likely to be disclosed. And that she had been told by the senior partner to say that it was not."
"It is not proof," said Ahreum.
"It is a Thursday," said Taewon. "I find that it is enough."
The telephone rang in his hand at twenty to ten.
He had gone out to the corridor, at the end of the long grey passage by the window, to be alone for a moment with the dark glass and the lights of the river. It was not eight o'clock. It was not the hour at which anyone in the world was supposed to ring him. He looked at the name, and something in his chest turned over like a fish.
"Ahreum."
"Hajin." She was in the next room, forty feet away. She had gone out ten minutes before, with her coat over her arm, to take a call from the hospital. "It is not the ledger. I am telephoning because I should like to."
"Please."
"Nurse Baek rang. She has been speaking with the surgeon since six. He has said that Halmoni may leave the ward on Friday, in the morning, for Seongbuk, with a nurse, and a wheelchair, and a case of tablets that Nurse Baek has promised to administer in person." Her voice was unsteady. "He said that she is to be kept in bed until Monday. He said that it is out of the question that she should attend a board meeting on Saturday."
"Is it?"
"It is entirely out of the question," said Ahreum. "She has told him so herself. She said that she had heard what the surgeon said, and that she had noted it, and that she should be at the tower at a quarter to ten. She said that it was not for him to say, it was only for him to push."
He laughed. He put his forehead against the cold glass of the window, and laughed so that his shoulders shook.
"She said," said Ahreum, and her own voice was breaking, "*I shall sit in my own chair.*"
"Is it safe?"
"No." She said it quite steadily. "She says that it is not the point."
He stood at the window with the telephone against his ear and the river lying below in its long black ribbon, strung with the lights of its bridges. It had begun, very softly, to snow. Behind him, in the small bright room, he could hear a chair scrape, and a man's cheerful hoarse voice ask whether there was any more tea. Somewhere forty feet away, a woman in a charcoal coat was standing in a doorway with her thumb against the seam of her cuff, and not moving it, and listening to him breathe.
"Then I shall carry the chair," said Hajin.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The recording ran for eleven minutes and forty seconds, and Mr. Lim played it twice.
He did it in the glass-walled meeting room on the thirty-fourth floor of the Daon building in Yeouido, at ten past ten on Tuesday morning, with the winter sun coming flat across the Han and the investment committee of the Daon Pension Fund sitting in a half circle round a long pale table with their reading glasses on. There were seven of them. Hajin sat at the end, at Mr. Lim's invitation, as a guest, with his hands folded and a cup of barley tea going cold at his elbow. He had been told that he might leave. He had said that he would prefer to stay.
A woman's voice came out of a small black speaker in the middle of the table. It was warm and quick and a little breathless, and it was so pleasant to listen to that he saw two of the older members, before they knew it, begin to smile.
*Mr. Lim, I am so sorry to trouble you again. I only wished to say that I think we have all been rather unfair to Mr. Yoon. He is such a gifted young man. It is only that he has had such a hard time, and I do worry that he is not quite himself. I thought that Daon, as a long-term holder, ought to know that he may not be, ah, entirely reliable in his judgement at present. I should hate for your members to be exposed.*
*I should be grateful if you could tell me what you intend to do on the ninth. I am only asking so that I can help.*
The tape ran on. It was very kind. It was all of it kind. There was a long, gentle, anxious passage about the pressure that a person is under when he has been publicly embarrassed, and a small sorrowful aside about the cruelty of the press, and a phrase, *I would not for the world say a word against him*, that was repeated, with slight variations, four times. Mr. Lim let it run to the end. Then he pressed a key, and the speaker clicked, and he laid his hand flat on the table.
"I have been in this chair for twenty-two years," he said. "I have been telephoned by a great many people who wished me to remember a great many things. I should like to say that I have never before been so thoroughly told what to think by a person who assured me that she was only asking."
There was a small dry laugh from the end of the table.
"Mr. Yoon," said Mr. Lim, "the committee has voted. We were five to two. It is our intention, if the Board of Seol Education proceeds on Saturday without hearing evidence touching the integrity of the Fund's records, to join with Maru Learning in a requisition under Article 12 for a general meeting of shareholders. We hold two point four. You hold nine. It is eleven point four, and I am advised that it is enough."
"I am grateful."
"Do not be." The heavy face did not alter. "We are doing it because it is our duty. We are not doing it because we like you. I should like to be quite clear. I have found that I do like you. It is not a thing that I allow to affect my vote."
Hajin bowed to him, and found, to his surprise, that he was smiling.
Chairman Pyo had a second pot of tea waiting for him on Wednesday morning.
It stood on the low lacquer table in the room on the twenty-eighth floor, in the soft light of the paper screens, on the same black tray, beside the same two celadon cups, with the iron kettle steaming on the brazier. The scroll of calligraphy hung on the wall behind it, four feet wide, in a hand so assured that he still could not read it. The old man rose when Hajin entered. He was in a dove-grey suit, silver-haired, upright, unhurried. He gave a very small bow, a degree and a half, and gestured to a cushion.
"Mr. Yoon. You are punctual. I had not hoped that you would come."
"You were kind to ask."
"I am often kind. It is a habit, and a strategy, and I have never been able to tell them apart." Pyo knelt and began to pour with both hands. "I imagine that you have come to refuse the chair a second time."
"Yes."
He said it plainly, with his hands on his knees, and the old man's hand did not falter on the pot. The tea went into the cup in a thin steady stream. The scent of roasted rice rose between them, and something much older and stranger.
"I should like to say why," said Hajin. "I think that you will find it useless. I should like to say it anyway."
"Please."
"It is a very good chair. I have wanted it for ten years, or I thought that I had. I find that what I wanted was to be asked what I would like to eat." He stopped. He had not planned the sentence, and it sat oddly in the quiet room. "Chairman, you have offered me a seat twice, with a pot of tea, and have not once asked me what I thought. I do not blame you. I have been given a great many chairs this winter. Not one of them was given to me. They were given to the vote."
Pyo set down the pot.
He sat with his hands folded on his knee and looked at the young man across the lacquer for a very long time, with the dry bright patience of a person who has spent forty years reading what men do not say. Then he did something that Hajin had not expected. He laughed. It was a short dry sound, very quiet, and it shook the silver head.
"The vote," said Pyo. "Yes. I should have said it better myself."
"I have not come to ask you for your vote. You have it, I think, for your own reasons."
"I have it for the reasons of an old man who does not like to see the Chairwoman's table taken by a division that can draw a pie chart." Pyo lifted his cup. "I do not pretend that they are noble. What do you ask?"
"Three things. I should like to ask for the first place on Saturday's agenda for a matter that I shall call the integrity of the Fund's records. I should like the Steward to be heard on it, though she cannot vote. And I should like the Commission's secretariat to be invited to attend as an observer."
"It is irregular."
"Attorney Cha tells me that it is permitted."
"Attorney Cha tells me a great many things that are permitted. I have found that it is the least of his virtues." Pyo drank. "And if I should say that it is irregular?"
"I shall not threaten you," said Hajin.
It came out so mildly that for a moment the old man did not seem to hear. He sat with the cup against his lip.
"I should like to tell you what I shall do, and what it will cost, on either road, and then you may decide. I have learned a thing this winter, from a woman who is a great deal braver than I. It is that one may say what one needs without making it a blade." He drew breath. "If the Board hears the evidence on Saturday, I shall vote as I think right, and we shall all go home, and I shall be a good deal less useful to your party than you hoped. If the Board does not, on Sunday morning Maru and Daon will lodge a requisition under Article 12 for a general meeting in March, with the evidence attached, and the Commission will be sent a copy of the lot. The press will have it by the afternoon. It will not be kind to anybody who was seen not to listen."
He stopped.
"That is all," said Hajin. "I should like you to know that I am sorry to have said it in a tea room."
Pyo set down his cup. He did it very gently, and sat looking at it for some time.
"I am old," he said, "but I am not blind."
"No."
"I drafted the minute, in 1994, that removed Seol Jaehyun from the succession schedule." The silver head did not lift. "It was a correct minute. It followed the articles. It was also the least kind thing that I have ever written, and I wrote it because I was asked, by a person whose name I shall not give you, and because I wished to be of use to the family." His mouth moved. "I have thought of it a great many times. A boy of thirty, with a young wife, who sat in the corridor outside that room for four hours and was not called in. I walked past him twice."
Hajin did not say anything.
"I do not tell you so that you will pity him. I tell you so that when I say that I shall hear your evidence, you will know that I do not do it for love of you." Pyo raised his eyes. They were grey and dry and very tired. "I shall hear Mr. Ma and the Principal privately on Thursday. I shall put your matter first. I shall invite the Commission. And I shall ask you, in return, one thing."
"Please."
"When it is done, I should like to be told what the girl's father did. I should not like to hear it from the newspaper."
"You shall," said Hajin.
The old man lifted the pot, and filled his cup again, and then, with unexpected formality, filled the other. "Drink it," said Chairman Pyo. "It is a vanity. It is also very good."
She was waiting in the lobby.
He saw her from the lift, through the long glass of the cage, as one sees a figure in an aquarium: small, in an oatmeal coat, at the end of the marble hall by the security counter, with her hands folded in front of her and her face lifted to an old man in a navy jacket who was telling her something that she found enchanting. It was Mr. Gu. He was talking about his daughter. Hajin could see it in the way the old man's hands moved, wide, to show the size of a thing, and the way that the girl nodded, and laughed, and put one hand on his sleeve.
Then she saw him, and turned her face, and it lit.
"Hajin!" She crossed the marble in a quick light run, with her coat flying open, and stopped a pace in front of him, a little breathless, her cheeks pink and her eyes enormous. "I have been standing here for forty minutes. Mr. Gu has been so kind. I did not wish to telephone and have you say no, because you would not say no to a face."
"Yurim."
"I wanted to see you before Saturday. That is all. I am not going to ask you for anything." She said it quickly, and with such perfect frankness that he had the old uneasy sense of being a swimmer, pleasantly drawn. "I only wished you to know that I am frightened. I have not said so to anyone. I do not think that anyone has noticed."
It was true. He knew that it was true. It was in the faint shake of her hands, in the white shadow round her mouth. He looked at it, and found, with a cold small shock, that it hurt.
"Halmoni is to come home on Friday," said Yurim. "Did you know? She told Nurse Baek and not me. I only heard from the housekeeper. She would not see me yesterday. I took her an orchid, and she turned her face to the wall." Her eyes filled, quite suddenly, and she wiped them with the heel of her hand. "I have done nothing but love her. I have been so careful to be good to her. I cannot think what I have done."
"I am sorry that you are unhappy."
"You are always so kind." She laid her fingers on his sleeve, lightly, as she had on a day in October. "Will you have dinner with me on Thursday? There is a little place in Hannam. We shall not talk about it. We shall only eat."
He looked at the fingers.
They were small, and warm, and quite steady, and he thought of a packet of tissues on a cold stair, and of a girl in a pale ribbon who had been kind to him in a terrible week. It was a thing that had happened. It had been real, and it was true, and it lay beside the other thing without touching it, like two papers on a counter. He did not know what she was. He thought that perhaps she did not either.
"No," said Hajin.
He said it gently. He took her hand from his sleeve, and did not drop it at once. He held it between his own, a moment, as one holds a thing that one does not mean to keep.
"I shall see you on Saturday," he said. "I should like to say what I think to your face, as I said. I shall do it in front of everyone, and I shall try to be kind. I do not know whether I shall manage."
Her face did not change. It did the other thing. It went quite still, as the surface of a pond goes still when something has gone down through it, and then, from behind it, a half beat late, the smile came up. It was small and sorrowful and a little crooked. It was the longest one that he had ever measured, and he did not count it.
"I shall sit next to you," said Yurim.
"I think that you will have your own chair," said Hajin.
She took her hand away. She stood with it against her coat, and looked at him for a long moment with an expression that he could not read, and then she turned, and walked away across the marble toward the revolving door, small and straight in her oatmeal coat. At the security counter she stopped. She said something to Mr. Gu, and he bowed. She went out. It had begun, a little, to snow.
Mr. Gu watched her go. Then he turned his head and looked, across the width of the lobby, at Hajin, and gave him a slow, creased, entirely noncommittal nod, as one acknowledges a fellow guard of a very long gate.
Mr. Ma exported the logs at five.
He did it in the Fund's records office on the eighteenth floor, at the terminal in the corner, with his lanyard round his neck and his thin anxious face lit blue from below, and Hajin stood behind him and watched. It took twenty minutes. Each file was copied, and sealed, and given a long string of letters and numbers that Mr. Ma read aloud, in a whisper, as a man reads the names of the dead. Taewon stood against the wall with the ring-binder under his arm. Attorney Cha, who had come up in the lift and said nothing, stood at the window with his hands behind him.
"The hash is recorded in three places," said Mr. Ma, at last, in a voice that cracked on the last word. "With the Commission's secretariat. In Attorney Cha's safe. And in a sealed envelope that I have given to Dr. Ko, who put it in a hard black case, and said that she should not let go of it in an aeroplane." He lifted his hands from the keys. "It cannot be altered now. Whatever is done on that account, it will not change what is here."
"Thank you, Mr. Ma."
"I should like to say," said Mr. Ma, "that I have been afraid of this account for three months. I find that I am not afraid of it today."
Hajin took out his telephone.
He did not send it. He stood in the middle of the records office with the telephone in his hand and, after a moment, held it out to the woman at the window. She had come in with Cha, quietly, a few minutes before, in her charcoal coat, with her glasses on, and had said nothing.
"The notice is drafted," said Hajin. "It is Ms. Park's. It suspends the delegated access of the acting member on the pilot's joint account under Section 11.2, for the breach of Section 6 that the Commission has already minuted. It does not mention the sixteenth floor, or the thirtieth, or a rabbit. It says only that a filing was made without circulation. It is true, and it is dull, and it is within our rights." He kept his voice quite level. "It will tell her that we have noticed. I do not think that it will tell her what. I should like to ask whether you agree that we should send it."
Ahreum took the telephone and read it. She read it slowly, to the end, with the corner of her thumb against the seam of her cuff.
"The Fund's side requires my countersignature," she said.
"Yes."
"It will warn her."
"A little."
"It is also correct," said Ahreum. "I do not think that it is a trap. A trap would not be minuted." She lifted her eyes. "I should like to leave the account open until the ninth, so that she may go on thinking that it is hers. And I should like to do the other thing. I should like to do what is plainly right, and not what is clever." She drew breath. "Yes. Send it."
He sent it at twenty-eight minutes to six. Attorney Cha, at the window, said nothing at all, but he took off his glasses, and polished them, for rather longer than the lenses required.
They worked on Thursday as two people work who have decided to be friends.
It was a thing that he had not expected, and it was the best part of the week. She had a room on the twenty-second floor and he had one on the fourteenth, and they used neither. They took the little conference room with the pale ash table and the window onto the roofs of Jongno, and laid out the plan on a single sheet, in two hands, hers in grey and his in red, and divided it as one divides a loaf.
"I shall telephone Mr. Lim and the Chairman," said Hajin. "I have a way with men who pour tea."
"I shall telephone Principal Moon, Mr. Ma, Attorney Cha and Dr. Ko." She wrote it down. "Who shall record?"
"You. Your writing is clearer."
"Mine is smaller. Yours is angrier." She did not look up. "I like it. It is easier to find."
He felt his ears go warm, and was grateful that she was looking at the page.
It was a pleasant, absurd, wholly new thing. He had never in his life worked with anyone without a hierarchy. He telephoned Mr. Lim, who was courteous, and the Chairman's secretary, who was not. She telephoned the Principal, who said *Yes, Director, yes, I have written it,* and Mr. Ma, who said *Yes, Director* before she had finished. At noon they ate rice cakes out of a paper bag, in silence, and at one she took out the little black notebook with two columns and wrote, and he looked at the window, and did not read it.
*Item twenty-four. His. I said what I should do and what it would cost, to an old man in a tea room, and did not make it a blade. I do not think that I did it well. I did it.*
She turned the book round, and slid it across the ash.
*Item twenty-four. Hers. Noted. It was well done. I should like it entered that it was.*
He looked at it for a very long time.
Taewon came at nine in the evening with the ring-binder and a paper bag, and sat on the edge of the ash table with his tie over his shoulder, and said, in the tone of a man reading out a weather report:
"Seongjin Partners replied at six."
They both turned.
"Attorney Cha served the instruction on Monday, by hand, with a copy of the deed. It is a very old firm. They have a senior partner called Gwon who is eighty years old, and who drew up the Samil deed in 1987 at Mr. Seol's kitchen table, and who has not been in the office on a Saturday since 1999." He took out a folded letter. "He has replied in his own hand. I shall read it. *To Attorney Cha. The instruction of the settlor is received and is in order. I have kept the schedule in my own safe for thirty-seven years. I have not opened it, because no person with the right to ask has asked. I shall bring it myself to the Board on the ninth, in the presence of the Commission, as she has directed. I should like it to be known that I have been waiting for this telephone call for a very long time.*"
Nobody spoke.
"He did not say who," said Taewon. "He would not. But the clerk who took the call, a girl called Moon, no relation, told Mr. Ma's cousin, who is in Compliance, that in the last month the firm had received two telephone calls from the Strategy division, asking whether the beneficiary schedule was ever likely to be disclosed. And that she had been told by the senior partner to say that it was not."
"It is not proof," said Ahreum.
"It is a Thursday," said Taewon. "I find that it is enough."
The telephone rang in his hand at twenty to ten.
He had gone out to the corridor, at the end of the long grey passage by the window, to be alone for a moment with the dark glass and the lights of the river. It was not eight o'clock. It was not the hour at which anyone in the world was supposed to ring him. He looked at the name, and something in his chest turned over like a fish.
"Ahreum."
"Hajin." She was in the next room, forty feet away. She had gone out ten minutes before, with her coat over her arm, to take a call from the hospital. "It is not the ledger. I am telephoning because I should like to."
"Please."
"Nurse Baek rang. She has been speaking with the surgeon since six. He has said that Halmoni may leave the ward on Friday, in the morning, for Seongbuk, with a nurse, and a wheelchair, and a case of tablets that Nurse Baek has promised to administer in person." Her voice was unsteady. "He said that she is to be kept in bed until Monday. He said that it is out of the question that she should attend a board meeting on Saturday."
"Is it?"
"It is entirely out of the question," said Ahreum. "She has told him so herself. She said that she had heard what the surgeon said, and that she had noted it, and that she should be at the tower at a quarter to ten. She said that it was not for him to say, it was only for him to push."
He laughed. He put his forehead against the cold glass of the window, and laughed so that his shoulders shook.
"She said," said Ahreum, and her own voice was breaking, "*I shall sit in my own chair.*"
"Is it safe?"
"No." She said it quite steadily. "She says that it is not the point."
He stood at the window with the telephone against his ear and the river lying below in its long black ribbon, strung with the lights of its bridges. It had begun, very softly, to snow. Behind him, in the small bright room, he could hear a chair scrape, and a man's cheerful hoarse voice ask whether there was any more tea. Somewhere forty feet away, a woman in a charcoal coat was standing in a doorway with her thumb against the seam of her cuff, and not moving it, and listening to him breathe.
"Then I shall carry the chair," said Hajin.
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