Han Seorin Did Not Ask the Price of New Copper Before the Empty Shelf

Han Seorin did not ask the price of new copper first, standing before the empty copper shelf.

The warehouse keeper opened the ledger. Twelve bundles of copper wire, eight battery plates. Outgoing: three bundles for telegraph repair, two plates for the ammunition process. By the paper, seven bundles of wire and six plates should have remained.

"Which cart arrived?"

"Number forty two."

"Who drove it?"

"Im Chilbok."

"What were the specifications?"

The warehouse keeper's hand stopped.

The ledger listed only "copper wire" and "battery plate." No thickness, width, weight, or cut face. Seorin looked longer at the empty specification column than at the empty shelf.

The quartermaster officer spoke from behind her.

"Just buy new. Can't your trading house get some today?"

"We can buy it."

"Then name the price."

"Including the price of losing it twice?"

The officer fell silent.

Seorin took out her own trading house's copper price sheet, then folded it away again. Buying at a high price now would keep telegraph repair and the ammunition process running for a day. But someone would learn that if the ledger balanced, they could pull the real goods and still see new money come in.

"We are not buying new copper."

"Are you going to stop the gate, then?"

"We buy the receipt first."

Seorin split the route of cart number forty two into three pieces. Dock intake, treasury inspection, workshop warehouse. At each stage she looked for whoever had confirmed the weight and the seal.

The dock receipt read four boxes of copper wire, two boxes of battery plate. The treasury inspection record read six boxes of copper goods. The workshop intake slip read twelve bundles and eight plates. The box count matched, but the unit of what was inside did not.

Seorin held the first receipt up to the light. Blue powder clung to the edge of the paper. She could not tell if it was copper corrosion or transport stamp pigment.

"Did you open the boxes?"

The dock weigher shook his head.

"The seals were intact."

"And the weight?"

"We weighed the whole load."

"How many gwan?"

The weigher went looking for the master ledger. In the line for cart forty two, the ink had bled and the last digit was unreadable. On a copy made by pressing thin paper over it, the number came out clear.

"Who made the copy?"

"A treasury clerk took it."

Seorin did not trust the copied number. She traced the grooves of the smeared original with her fingernail. The pressed brush strokes formed two lines, but the copy had three. She still did not know whether a digit had been added or dropped.

Min Chaeok was waiting at the temporary treasury audit office. Three neat ledgers sat in front of him.

"I hear you did not buy new copper."

"I would not add the cost of a leak on top."

"Who pays for the delay to telegraph repair?"

"Who pays for the cost of buying new instead of finding the copper that went missing?"

The corner of Min Chaeok's mouth moved just slightly.

"You use the same question I would."

"A ledger always borrows someone else's question."

He did not smile. He opened the first volume. The treasury inspection record bore his department's seal. Six boxes on cart forty two, seals normal, total weight summed. The number matched the dock copy.

"Does the total add up?" Min Chaeok asked.

"Only the box count does."

"Who pays for that exception?"

"Whoever signed off without looking inside the boxes should explain first."

Seorin pointed to the names of the confirming officers beneath the seal. Two treasury clerks, one army transport officer. Min Chaeok's name was not among them. But the seal had gone out under his department's authority.

"Do you seal your own department's ledgers too?"

"Keeping the ledger to be audited inside the audit office reduces the risk of tampering."

"The seal the audit office stamped is also inside it."

Min Chaeok kept his composed expression.

"It is the department seal, not mine personally."

"That is the cheapest kind of immunity there is."

The air in the room stiffened. Seorin knew the cost of that sentence. If treasury payments stalled, her own trading house's settlements could be delayed too.

Min Chaeok closed the second ledger and had someone bring the sealing cord.

"Bind all three volumes."

A clerk asked in surprise.

"Even the audit's own running ledger?"

"That one especially."

"Work will stop."

"We proceed with copies. We do not exclude the original just because it carries my department's seal."

Min Chaeok did not stamp his own seal on the sealing cover. He had a workshop worker's representative, the dock weigher, and an outside treasury clerk each mark the knot of the cord. It meant his own department could not reopen it alone.

Seorin did not think he had turned kind. The wider the audit's scope grew, the more transport information and trading house debts Min Chaeok would hold. His consistency could be trusted, but not necessarily his purpose.

"Who gets to see the sealed copies?"

"Treasury, army supply, the workshop, your trading house."

"The worker representatives see them too."

"Including your trading house's credit dealings?"

"Only the amounts and dates attached to copper transport. The names of trading partners are covered."

Min Chaeok stopped calculating.

"What if the covered name is the transport route?"

"Two representatives cross check against the original, and only a mark remains on the public copy."

"You place private credit above public audit."

"You did not place your department's seal above solitary audit either."

For a while the two of them looked over each other's ledgers. It was not a moment of agreement, but a measuring of how much each could still hide.

Im Chilbok, the driver of cart forty two, was brought in that afternoon. There were no ropes. Min Chaeok seated him apart from the other drivers, saying he wanted to prevent contamination of testimony before flight risk.

Seorin asked.

"Did you load six boxes?"

"Yes."

"Was it heavy?"

"The rear axle sank once."

"Where?"

Im Chilbok named the stone bridge between the dock and the treasury office. He said he had removed a wheel, unloaded the boxes, and loaded them again.

"Who helped you?"

"Two inspection soldiers and a porter from the roadside."

"Names?"

He knew the soldiers' names but not the porter's. He remembered only the man's face, a torn shoulder on his left sleeve, and gloves that smelled of copper.

Min Chaeok asked.

"Did you open the boxes?"

"I did not."

"Did you check the seals?"

"One was wet when we reloaded."

"Why did you not record it?"

"It was raining."

"Who pays for that exception?"

Im Chilbok's face went white. Seorin cut the question off.

"Which box had the wet seal?"

He pointed to one of the battery plate boxes. He also remembered where it had sat on the cart. Right rear, directly above the axle.

Seorin went to look at the cart. The floor of the bed had six scrape marks. Only the right rear mark was narrower than the rest. If the same box had been reloaded, there was no reason for the width to differ.

"Either the box was switched, or the weight inside it changed," Min Chaeok said.

"It's a possibility."

"One of the two must be true."

"It could be neither. Wet wood can also shrink."

Seorin did not settle on the inference that favored her own theory either. Instead she wrote down the width of the scrape mark, the time of the axle repair, and the hour the rain had fallen.

At the repair shop near the stone bridge, a broken axle wedge remained. The owner said it had come off cart forty two. A thin sliver of copper was caught in the groove of the wedge.

Set against the battery plate sample Mujeong had brought, the thickness did not match. It was thinner than the plate meant for the workshop, and one edge carried a regular row of saw teeth.

"Is this for the ammunition process?" Seorin asked.

Mujeong shook his head.

"That's not the mark of our cutting saw."

"For telegraph use?"

"That one's thicker than this."

The copper sliver fit neither of the workshop's two specifications. Whether the missing goods had been a different specification from the start, or had been switched along the road, or had been thinly sliced off, none of it was known.

Min Chaeok attached the sliver to his own department's inspection ledger. That ledger was already an object under seal.

Seorin pressed the tooth spacing of the copper sliver onto paper. The teeth repeated seven times within one chi. The workshop saw Mujeong had brought left five marks over the same length, and the small saw used for telegraph terminal plates left nine.

Min Chaeok asked.

"Does this end once we find a place that uses a seven tooth saw?"

"It's not an end, it's the next receipt."

"Why?"

"A saw can be borrowed, and a sliver can come off a different cart."

The owner of the repair shop near the stone bridge said he had found the thin battery plate sliver in a scrap iron bucket. The bucket held mixed cart nails, a broken horseshoe, and two telegraph terminal pieces. Even after picking out only the copper, Seorin did not treat the owner's account as settled evidence. There was no record of who had put it in the bucket, or when.

"So this sliver is useless, then?" the owner asked.

"Until it matches another record, it's one line of suspicion."

Seorin found the axle repair charge for cart forty two in the shop's ledger. The payer was the treasury inspection soldier. It was money paid by the office, but the repair fee did not appear in the workshop's transport ledger. She needed to check whether the soldier had paid out of his own pocket, or folded it into some other cost.

Min Chaeok did not arrest the soldier immediately. Omitting one line of repair fee and switching a copper box were not the same crime.

"I will ask about the source of payment first."

"What if he flees?"

"We must also write down the cost of tying an innocent person to that risk."

"I will bind this into the audit as well."

"It could be evidence of your own department's negligence."

"That is exactly why it cannot be excluded."

He had the clerks record the time the audit was suspended. His own department's payment work fell behind by half a day. Some national treasury settlements were also delayed. It was not a phrase spoken to look fair. It was an actual cost.

Seorin did not tear up the new copper price sheet. She only drew a red line through the purchase column. She would not buy new copper until the specifications on the existing receipts, the axle at the stone bridge, the wet seal, and the thin battery plate sliver had been checked against one another.

When she returned to the workshop, Yun Sunhwa was hanging a white cloth on the door of the workers' dormitory.

The edges of the wound on Seokbeom's finger had grown hot, and the scratches on two apprentices who slept in the same room had also reddened and swollen. The workshop people shared one well and shared towels.

"How many?" Seorin asked.

"Three with fever. Two with open wounds."

"The workshop?"

"We're splitting the crew that had contact with the dormitory people."

The quartermaster officer came running.

"We already stopped because of the jig. If you cut the crew in half, we make nothing at all."

Sunhwa tied off the end of the white cloth.

"If we sleep them together, we lose even more."

"Has it been confirmed as infection?"

"We don't mix people until it's confirmed."

Seorin opened the workshop wage sheet. There was no column for wages during quarantine. Work stoppage was tied to the accident process, but dormitory isolation was a different reason.

"Who pays quarantine wages?"

Sunhwa looked at her.

"Separate the people first."

Seorin did not withdraw the question, but she changed its order. They would split the contact group, separate the water buckets and towels, and decide who would pay afterward.

The available workforce on the workshop's production sheet fell from twelve to six.

The road of the missing copper had forked at the stone bridge, and the road of the remaining workers had forked at the dormitory door.

That day's output dropped by half.