The Big Score - 8
"Why?! Why on earth would you burn the secret ledger?"
He looked ready to grab me by the collar then and there. An excellent reaction. It would make the bargaining so much easier.
"I am not Unhyeon."
I took a sip of tea and answered in a calm voice.
"Not Unhyeon, you say?"
Jeong Munwon had evidently sensed some hidden design behind my composure, for he settled his half-risen backside back onto the chair.
"I am no chivalric hero—I am a constable. My duty is not to hunt down corrupt officials. It is to catch thieves."
"Catching the great thieves of the state is the bounden duty of any man who has eaten the state's grain."
"Ah! But I have yet to receive a single coin of that grain."
The Chief Constable had told me the budget ran short, so there was no money to pay a specially commissioned constable—would he be permitted to pay me at a later date?
"Ugh! H-how much does a constable's salary even come to?"
An unexpected counterargument, apparently. The Inspector's face flushed red for an instant.
"Haha. A man appointed to catch the nation's thieves cannot catch so much as one himself, yet you expect a great deal from a mere constable."
That was enough teasing, done in the name of calming the Inspector down. Time to steer the conversation back on course.
"...Then give it to me instead. I will make use of it."
"I refuse."
I shook my head with flat finality.
"What did you say?"
"Unlike a man who passed the imperial examination at the mere age of thirty, won His Majesty's trust, and rose to become an Imperial Inspector, I am nothing but a Black Hair who gets trampled the moment someone takes it into his head to trample him. For a man like me, a source of trouble is better off burned."
Why did I want to burn the secret ledger? I had made my position unmistakably clear.
"I could become your source of trouble! Throwing you into a cell this very instant would be no trouble at all!"
At my firm stance, the Inspector surged up from his chair with a shout. A lifetime spent with his nose in books, that must be why. The man simply doesn't know how to bargain.
"Inspector. One issues threats only when one is confident of obtaining what one wants."
I had to command this conversation from beginning to end. I had not the slightest intention of being swept along at the Inspector's pace.
"Ugh!"
"The moment you step out of this mansion to summon your men, I burn the ledger. I will be hauled off to prison, and the Shadowless Divine Thief will run rampant. The world will cry out for Constable Kang, and you, Inspector, will have fingers pointed at your back. Before long, you will draw more curses than the Provincial Governor himself."
With a faint smile laced with scorn, I quelled the Inspector's fury.
"What in the world am I supposed to do, then?"
What, did we meet as sworn enemies in a past life or something? Why glare at me like that? Glaring at me as though we were foes locked in a duel to the death, the Inspector flopped back down into his seat.
"I am no chivalric hero, it is true. But I am a constable—and a merchant. And merchants have something they love."
"Are you proposing a deal with me, then?"
Correct answer.
"I will place the ledger upon my scale. You, Inspector, shall be the one to set the counterweight on the other side."
Before the Inspector's eyes, I conjured an imaginary balance and made a show of laying the ledger upon one of its pans.
The Provincial Governor's secret ledger.
A weapon to drive the killing blow into an enemy. And to persuade a Black Hair constable, a counterweight of staggering heft would be required.
I could feel the Inspector's gaze drifting toward a secret ledger that existed nowhere on that imaginary scale. Countless thoughts must have been racing through his head.
What answer will you give me?
"Do you want an official post?"
"I have a roof to sleep under and no fear of going hungry tomorrow. That is enough for me."
Wrong answer.
"Is there a favor you wish to ask of me?"
"Neither too near, nor too far. A merchant who leans on power may grow swiftly, but he is bound to rot from the core out."
My business had to be built on my own ability.
"Then what is it you want?"
Could he truly not fathom it? The Inspector pressed me, looking frustrated.
Why must I burn the ledger? How desperately did the Inspector want the Provincial Governor's ledger? I had set the value of the goods on the table high enough—time, then, to get down to business.
"The Shadowless Divine Thief."
"What?"
The answer caught him off guard; the Inspector's eyes flew wide.
"From this moment on, every act of corruption you expose must be credited to the Shadowless Divine Thief."
"I cannot admit to receiving the help of a mere thief!"
Why was he hammering the table as though to break it?
Sir. I don't own this mansion—I lease it. If Mangeum Hall bills me for the fixtures when I move out, I will never manage to pay. Kindly handle the furniture with care.
"You may report to the court that you uncovered it all yourself."
I had spoken up, after all, to protect the fixtures on my lease.
"And then?"
"Not in Wuhan. In Wuhan, it was the Shadowless Divine Thief who brought the corruption to light, and you, Inspector, must become his unseen hand behind the scenes."
Inspector, do work hard for the sake of the Shadowless Divine Thief's good name.
Such were my conditions for handing over the secret ledger.
"...Do you have some manner of connection with the Shadowless Divine Thief?"
Jeong Munwon studied me with suspicious eyes.
A perfectly natural question.
Asking me to work for the Shadowless Divine Thief while coveting neither office nor wealth? Anyone would have found it suspicious.
How was I to dispel the Inspector's suspicion?
I had originally prepared any number of methods for clearing away the Inspector's doubts, but if the Inspector in question was Jeong Munwon, the matter was simple.
For Jeong Munwon was a character from within my own novel—and for him, I had the single best method there was.
"For His Majesty the Emperor. For the sake of this realm. That is why."
Devotion to the nation.
He was an official who had suffered covering up after the Imperial Princess's affairs, but his loyalty to the Emperor and the realm was genuine.
"What are you saying?"
And there it was—the suspicion ebbing from his gaze, little by little. But I could not stop here.
"As you have seen for yourself, Inspector, I possess a small talent as a constable. Somewhere along the way, as I used that talent to hunt the Shadowless Divine Thief, I came to understand what he truly wants."
And why would what I wanted amount to work that served us all? A brief explanation was in order.
"What he wants?"
"Tell me, Inspector. What do you make of the Shadowless Divine Thief?"
"I don't care for the man, but I can well understand why the common people are so enamored of him. I suppose he is a righteous thief, just as they say in Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon."
As an official of the state he dislikes him—but since he himself relished the Provincial Governor affair, I suppose he grants credit where credit is due.
But here's the thing.
"In my view, he is no righteous thief."
Not that I actually believed that.
"Not a righteous thief?"
"Since becoming a constable, there is one truth I have kept firmly in mind. However outlandish a criminal's behavior, his essence never strays beyond the human way of thinking. If he had acted from purely noble intent, would he have imitated Pungun Hyeopgaekjeon and left black paper cranes behind him?"
"That is true..."
"He is a murim man before he is a righteous thief. And once we think of him as a murim man, we can read his principles of action largely through a murim man's eyes. Tell me, Inspector—what would you say is one of the values the murim hold most dear?"
The Inspector mulled over my question for a moment before opening his mouth.
"...Reputation?"
"Yes. His guiding principle is reputation."
"What has that to do with anything?"
"We must put him to use."
To draw out Jeong Munwon's cooperation, I had to erase not only his suspicion of me but also his distaste for the Shadowless Divine Thief.
A righteous thief whose principles defied comprehension. A phantom thief the like of which the Central Plains had never seen. I meant to wipe away those countless epithets and plant in the Inspector's mind the illusion that this was a creature he could put to use.
"Put him to use?"
Jeong Munwon tilted his head, evidently not following.
"The Shadowless Divine Thief may be a murim man, but it is equally true that he is hailed as a righteous thief who presses a blade to society's rot—something neither you, Inspector, nor the constables could manage. What we do is help his renown spread across the whole of Hubei Province."
"Exposing the graft of corrupt officials through the Shadowless Divine Thief..."
"We lend the Shadowless Divine Thief an empty fame, and you, Inspector, carve out this realm's festering sores."
Because we could understand the principle behind the Shadowless Divine Thief's actions, we could set him moving according to our design.
If we were willing to let our hands grow a little dirty, we could make him the Inspector's collaborator.
"Aiding the Shadowless Divine Thief for the sake of the nation..."
He was swaying enough. Now, at last, it was time to extend my hand.
"Will you accept?"
Like an angler lowering into the water a line baited with an irresistible lure, I held out the secret ledger.
Jeong Munwon stared hard at the secret ledger that had at last appeared.
It was an utterly seductive offer. Endure a slight stain upon his name, and everything else was gain. And yet there was one blind spot.
As an Imperial Inspector, Jeong Munwon was a man who knew how to hold his patience until every lingering doubt was resolved.
"You never had any intention of burning the ledger from the start, did you."
"Who can say?"
A smile that looked like assent. Yet what lay behind it was utterly unreadable—at moments he seemed a treacherous minister, at others a loyal one.
Jeong Munwon felt as though he were facing some venerable elder statesman of the court.
"The deal itself was a deception from the very start. A deal requires that both sides gain something. You have gained nothing from this affair. Why did you contrive it all?"
It was clearly a fine offer—one from which both the Shadowless Divine Thief and himself stood only to gain. Yet the very man who had set the goods upon the scale would profit nothing from the transaction.
Kang Yunho had framed it as a merchant's bargain, but it had never been a bargain at all.
Could he truly have some secret tie to the Shadowless Divine Thief?
In the instant that doubt flashed through Jeong Munwon's mind, a remark that would sweep it away in a single stroke sprang from the Black Hair constable's lips.
"I am not Unhyeon. I am a Black Hair constable. But I am a subject of this realm."
Kang Yunho smiled as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, and showed his devotion to the realm once more.
A constable who catches the nation's thieves. A constable who cannot stand idle in the face of crime. So he had never once been dealing with me as a merchant. For Jeong Munwon the Inspector, that was answer enough.
"But why me? You could have gone to the Chief Constable."
"I trust the Chief Constable, but he is no man of great vessel. To have begun as a common runner and climbed to that seat means he is well practiced at wagging his tail like a hound of power. The man I needed was one whose vessel was large enough to bear the secret ledger."
"And how did you judge whether my vessel was large enough?"
What if he had judged him a vessel too small to bear the secret ledger? What if he were the sort who, having caught a constable in league with the Shadowless Divine Thief, would hand him straight over to the authorities? What had he meant to do, that he had raised the matter at all?
Jeong Munwon regarded Kang Yunho with a face full of questions.
"Why would I ever need to judge whether your vessel is narrow or vast, Inspector?"
"What?!"
"Could anything His Majesty employs with his own hands ever be small?"
"...!"
Faced with a devotion to the Emperor so absolute it had struck even himself speechless, Jeong Munwon could doubt Kang Yunho no longer.
"Please. Put it to good use."
Jeong Munwon carefully accepted the Provincial Governor's ledger that Kang Yunho held out.
Something he had wanted so desperately he had come in person to a Black Hair constable's mansion. A weapon that could pierce the heart of the corrupt official he called his nemesis.
The Inspector had at last obtained what he desired, and yet his gaze was not upon the secret ledger.
Perhaps...
Perhaps the treasure he truly needed to obtain—more than the Provincial Governor's secret ledger—was standing right before his eyes.
An intuitive brilliance unlike anything he had ever heard of.
A renown greater than any constable in Wuhan, a loyal heart aching for the nation, and boundless faith in His Majesty.
A man who loathed corruption and coveted no wealth, who—Black Hair though he was—discharged his duty as His Majesty's subject with a devotion rarely seen.
Before the constable who had stolen his gaze, Imperial Inspector Jeong Munwon heard a proposal leap unbidden from his own lips.
"Would you perhaps care to work with me?"