Kuroda murmured something approving under his breath. For a few seconds the table held a conversation Pierce could stand outside of, and she could see that standing outside it cost him more than he would ever admit.
"Well," Pierce said loudly, in English, reclaiming the room the only way he knew how. "That was very pretty. Very pretty indeed."
"Thank you, sir," Jasmine said.
"It sounded," he continued, "like something from a phrasebook. Or one of those language apps. The greeting they teach you on day one, with the bowing." He mimed a shallow bow, grinning at his own performance.
"It was a formal greeting, sir," she said. "That is what the occasion called for."
"Of course it was." He nodded with exaggerated patience. "I'm not criticizing. It was charming. It's just that a memorized phrase is not the same as speaking a language. I memorized some French in school. Bonjour, merci. Nobody would say I speak French."
Fujita's smile had disappeared. She set her cup down and folded her hands, and Jasmine recognized the gesture for what it was: a woman choosing not to speak in a room where speaking would only make things worse.
"I understand the difference, sir," Jasmine said.
"Do you?" Pierce's tone sharpened with amusement. "Because there's a whole world between wishing someone a pleasant evening and actually holding a conversation. Business. Ideas. Jokes, even. The real thing."
"Yes, sir. There is."
He studied her, searching her calm face for a crack, a flinch, some sign that she understood she had been caught pretending. He found nothing, and the nothing seemed to irritate him more than defiance would have.
In his experience, people knew their place in his sentences. They were the subject, or they were the joke, but they were never simply unmoved, standing quietly beyond the reach of his interpretation of them.
Ishida spoke, calmly, in English. "Mr. Pierce. Her greeting was spoken very well. The honorifics were correct. That is not a small thing in our language."
"I'm sure it isn't," Pierce said, without looking away from Jasmine. "Kazuo, you're a gentleman. You would compliment the soup if the chef asked you to. It's good manners, and I admire it."
It was a dismissal wrapped in praise, delivered to a man Pierce claimed as his partner, in front of that man's entire team. Kuroda's jaw tightened. Takagi stared at the tablecloth as if it owed him money.
Jasmine felt heat rise in her chest, not shame, but a slow, disciplined anger. She had carried plates past men like this for two years. She had smiled through evaluations of her hair, her walk, her supposed attitude.
What Pierce was doing now was different only in scale. He had decided who she was before she opened her mouth, and every true thing she said would be reclassified as a trick until it fit the decision he had already made.
Jasmine thought of the notebooks stacked beside her bed at home, three of them filled this year alone. Kanji practiced until her hand ached. Sentences copied, spoken aloud to an empty apartment, corrected against recordings late at night.
None of that work had been done for a room like this. It had been done because the language had asked something of her at fourteen and she had never stopped answering. That was the part Pierce could not imagine.
He believed every skill was a performance waiting for a buyer. She knew some skills were simply a life, built quietly, whether anyone with money ever noticed them or not.
"Ask her something else, then," Pierce said suddenly, turning to Ishida. "No. Wait." He held up a finger, delighted with a new shape forming in his mind. "I have a better idea than a quiz."
"Sir," Jasmine said, "your guests are here for your dinner. I should let you return to it."
"You are the dinner now," he said, and laughed, and reached into the inside pocket of his jacket with the unhurried confidence of a man reaching for the next act of a show he owned.
His phone came out first. Then his smile widened, and Jasmine understood, with a cold clarity that settled in her stomach, that whatever he was about to do, he intended it to be remembered.
Pierce set his phone against a water glass, camera aimed roughly at the space between himself and Jasmine. The little red recording light came on. He glanced at it the way performers glance at mirrors.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, though there were no ladies and gentlemen beyond the seven people already in the room, "we are about to have some fun with this."
"Mr. Pierce," Kuroda said quietly.
"A story needs witnesses," Pierce went on, ignoring him. "Tomorrow we sign a four hundred forty million dollar deal. Tonight, we settle a smaller question." He turned his grin on Jasmine. "Considerably smaller. Though not for you, I imagine."
Jasmine said nothing. Her eyes moved once to the phone, to its indifferent red eye, and then back to Pierce. She would not perform discomfort for his recording. She would not perform anything at all.
"Here is my proposition." He raised one finger again, savoring the theater of it. "One million dollars. Cash value, check, however you like it. One million dollars says you cannot hold a real conversation in Japanese."
The words fell into the room and the room changed temperature.
Silverware did not move. The server station outside the door went quiet, as if even the corridor had heard. Fujita's hand stopped halfway to her glass and returned, empty, to her lap.
Pierce let the silence work, mistaking it for awe. "Not a greeting. Not a phrase from an app. A real conversation, with Mr. Ishida here, on a real subject, sustained, natural, the way two people actually talk. You do that, the money is yours. You can't, and, well." He shrugged pleasantly. "Dinner proceeds."
"A million dollars," Takagi repeated, very softly, in English, as if confirming he had not misheard the number through the barrier of a second language. He had not misheard it. Neither had anyone.