Chapter 10: Nine Seats

Sun-ja had drawn the council on the back of a school exercise book, nine small circles in a horseshoe.

She tapped each one with a rubber-gloved finger.

"The chair. Three who do what the chair does. Daewon has lunched all four of them at the hotel in Sabuk, twice."

"That's four," Seok-hyun said.

"Two I raised with my own soup. Their fathers were in the Nine." She tapped two more. "And three nobody knows."

It was Saturday morning, and the lamp house was crowded with people who had not been asked to come.

The five hunters sat on the bench in a row with their embers in their pockets.

The woman with the mitten was feeding the heavy man a rice ball.

Da-hae stood at the counter with her case open, writing figures on the back of her hand.

"Five votes carry the resolution," Sun-ja said. "That's the Act. Consent is a simple majority of those present."

"Then we need all three," said Seok-hyun.

"We need all three, and each of them needs a different reason." She turned the page. "The doctor who runs the clinic."

"The man with the school buses. And her."

She drew a small star beside the last circle.

"The museum," Sun-ja said, and her voice softened. "She's the one who matters."

The Taebaek Coal Museum stood at the end of Hwangji-ro in a long concrete building.

A headframe model stood in front, and a bronze miner on a plinth.

Sun-ja had called ahead.

The woman who let them in at two that afternoon was in her fifties, in a green cardigan.

She wore reading glasses on a chain and carried a heavy ring of keys.

She was the museum's director, and for eleven years she had also been the council's only woman.

She walked them past a mannequin in a 1980s pit suit, with a carbide lamp, and a case of black briquettes.

A wall of photographs of men with their faces turned to the camera, and he realized that every man in the photographs was dead.

"I don't vote for holes," she said.

"I'm not asking you to vote for a hole."

"Then what are you asking?" She stopped at the center of the room, where a table-sized model of the Hwangji pit lay under glass.

"Sun-ja says you want me to vote for a keeping, which is nothing. There's no word for it in the Act."

"There's Article 31."

"Nobody's ever used Article 31." She took off her glasses. "I've read it. Do you know why?"

"No one's had a dungeon that didn't overflow."

"Yes," she said, and looked at him properly for the first time. "My father died in Pit Seven in 1988."

"I've spent thirty-eight years watching this town sell itself, one lot at a time, for a park."

He said nothing, because there was nothing in the Act that answered that.

His eyes had caught on the model under the glass.

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