Hwang's shop was shut, which it never was after five. The sign on the glass had been turned to a hand-lettered card that said CLOSED FOR FUNERAL, and under it, in smaller writing, NOT YOURS.

Seon-ho let himself in with the key Hwang had given him at sixteen and never mentioned. The room smelled of broth and bleach. Six of the stools were up on the counter. Four people sat at the one table that was still down, and a pot of something dark was ticking on the stove behind them like a clock.

"Sit," said Hwang, without turning round. "Eat. You look like a pressed flower."

"I'm fine."

"Laozi said a man who says he is fine has already been counted among the dead. Or possibly the man who fixed my boiler."

Lourdes slid a bowl at him with one finger, the way a bartender slides a glass. She had come off her shift in the pink scrubs she wore on Ward 4 and had a letter in front of her, flattened under the heel of her hand, as if it might try to leave. Dil was on the bench with her boots up, eating pickled radish from the jar. Priya was at the end with her tablet, upright as a rule.

"Read it," said Lourdes.

Seon-ho read it. It was from Sunrise Care's accounts office, on cream paper, with a courteous header. *Following review of institutional arrangements, the daily rate for Room 412 will be revised from 912,000 won to 1,284,000 won, with effect from the first of next month.*

He did the sum in his head, because it was the only part of him still working. Three hundred and seventy-two thousand won more, a day. Eleven million, a month, give or take the length of it. Over and above the nine hundred he already could not pay.

"Mr. Jeong's raise doesn't cover it," said Priya, who had done it faster.

"Nothing covers it," said Dil. "Tide Hall paid the arrears. But arrears is arrears, it was always his money. The Mins will give you a retainer, I'd bet my taxi. A Hall contract consultant gets thirty a month, forty if he's rude."

"I won't take a retainer from a man who stamped for them."

"You took his pad."

"I took his pad. I'll need a different kind of money for the rest." He picked up his chopsticks and put them down. "They're not interested in being paid. That was never what the fourteen days were. If I take the Records post, the rate stays where it was, and I think that's the point. I get to sign something in order to keep her in the bed."

"Clause three," said Lourdes darkly. "I've got it in the notebook. Page four."

"You wrote it down."

"I write everything down. He came on a Tuesday, the director. Round glasses, a cardigan, so polite, so *sorry.* He asked me to plait the hair differently. He said the left braid was better for the circulation." She pushed the notebook across. The page had a small drawing of a man's head and a crossed-out question mark. "I let him. I want you to know I let him. I thought he was a relative."

"You couldn't have known."

"I know I couldn't. That's what I'm *angry* about."

Nobody spoke. Hwang had begun to ladle broth into a bowl for himself with great ceremony, and it was the ladle, the goose-handled ladle, which hung in his hand like something being held up for evidence. Seon-ho looked at it and felt, for the first time since he left Floor Nine, the old easy absurdity of it. Then he looked at Hwang's back. The shoulders were up around the ears.

"Grandmaster," he said.

"Eat your soup."

"You've known where my father is since the night I was thirteen."

The ladle stopped.

"I haven't," said Hwang.

"You told the others at the whiteboard that he asked you to tell me the truth in the right order. You said it twice. I counted. Priya counted."

"Four times," said Priya, without looking up.

"I've been waiting for the right order for eleven years," said Seon-ho. "I've now decided that I can't tell what it is, and I would like to see how it ends."

Dil lowered the radish jar. Lourdes crossed herself with her thumb, a small automatic gesture, like pressing a lift button. Hwang put the ladle on its hook, carefully, so the neck lay against the wall, and then he took off his apron. He folded it in four. He sat down across from Seon-ho and rested both hands on the table, palms up, the way a man shows he is not carrying anything.

"The first thing is a failure," he said. "I would rather do it the old way, which is badly, with a proverb, but I find I have lost them all."

"You mean you've used them up."

"I mean they have all been mine." A twitch of the mouth. "Eleven years ago in March, the night they said your father went off the Ongdo ferry, I was on the quay. Not near. On the east pier, at the end, with a thermos. I was there because he had asked me to be, three days before, in this room, on that stool. He said: *Come on Thursday and don't come close. If anything goes wrong, you will want to have seen it, and if nothing goes wrong, you will want to have seen that.*" Hwang's eyes were on the table. "I thought it was a poet's way of saying he was scared."

"And?"

"And at ten past one in the morning I saw a launch come in under the east pier lights. Not a ferry. A grey launch, no name, low in the water, with the Registry's crest on the wheelhouse. Two men in grey on the deck, and one with a lantern. Your father came down the quay steps in his good coat. He didn't hurry. He had a case in each hand, which I did not understand at the time. He nodded to the men with the lantern like a man being introduced to somebody's in-laws, and he stepped aboard."

"Stepped."

"Stepped. There was no scuffle, Seon-ho. I would have gone to the water and hit somebody. I wanted to. But he had told me not to come close, and I'd known your father for thirty years, since he stole flour from me, and in thirty years he had never once asked for the one thing and been wrong. So I stood. And the launch went out, and a quarter of an hour afterward a ferry did go by, and somebody called out that a man had fallen, and there was a coat in the water. His good coat. With a scrap of the manifest in the pocket so it would be known." Hwang's hands tightened on the wood. "I said nothing. I said it was a tragedy. I stood in the front row at the memorial in a black tie and let them put your mother's hand in mine."

The pot ticked on the stove. Seon-ho found that he had put the chopsticks down in a perfectly straight line. He realised that he had done so as a way to avoid moving anything else.

"He went because he chose to," he said.

"I believe so. I have believed so for eleven years and I have also believed that I should have broken both his legs."

"Why did he tell you not to follow?"

"He never said." Hwang looked up. His round face was grey under the lamp. "Three weeks ago, in this room, at one in the morning, I asked him. I asked him directly. He said, *because you would have gone after me, old man, and then you'd have been on the list.* Whatever list that is."

Priya made a small sound, like a breath held and let go. Dil had put the radish jar on the floor.

"That's the failure," said Hwang. "The rescue I did not make. The rest has an order, he said, but I don't think I'm the right man to place it. That is all I have. It is, I think, the first thing. I may be wrong about the order."

Seon-ho got up.

He did not do it angrily. He pushed the stool in, and took the rope bracelet off his wrist to look at it, and put it back on. The chair legs scraped. "Thank you for the soup," he said.

"Seon-ho."

"I'm fine," said Seon-ho, which was precisely what he had said at the door, and then he was on the pavement under the Cheongpa lamps with the card swinging on its string behind him: CLOSED FOR FUNERAL. NOT YOURS.

He went up the hill steps. There were a hundred and forty of them and he did not count. The air smelled of frying and salt. Somewhere below, a scooter went by with a delivery box on its back, one of Bballi's, the orange kind, and its tail light jolted and went out round the bend. He sat on the sixtieth step, which was the one with the cracked edge, and put his forehead on his knees.

He had expected his father to be a victim of the Registry. For eleven years he had built a house for that idea, with rooms, and a lamp in the window. It had never once occurred to him that a man could walk down a quay in his good coat with a case in each hand and a plan.

A step creaked below him.

Priya sat down two steps under him, not touching, with her knees together and her tablet on her lap. She did not say anything for a long time. Her thumb knocked twice on the plastic edge, and then she took a breath and turned the tablet over, face down, as though it was a thing she had decided to put away for the night.

"I haven't got a list," she said.

"That's all right."

"I tried. I got as far as *one.* Then I just had a feeling, and I don't have a numbered place for it." She was looking out at the harbour, where the cranes stood in rows in the dark like patient animals. "I would like to sit here. That's all. If it's not an inconvenience."

He lifted his head. The city was spread out below them in a hundred bridges of light, and out in the dark water beyond the outer harbour something very large and slow was moving, a ship with no name he could read, turning toward the open sea.

"It isn't," said Seon-ho. "It really isn't."

Somewhere inside his jacket his phone began, very quietly, to buzz.