Lin Weiguo laughed.
It was a short laugh, dry and quick, more breath than sound, and it changed his face entirely. For a second he did not look like a man who ran sixty thousand people. He looked like a schoolboy who had heard a forbidden word in the back of the classroom.
Behind him, among the five in dark suits, a tall serious woman of about fifty with short gray hair and steel-framed glasses put her hand over her mouth. A younger man beside her grinned before he could stop himself, and then looked hastily at the gravel.
Bradley Kincaid stood on the path with his arms still folded, looking from one of them to the other, and understood nothing.
* * *
"The grandmothers of Futian," Lin said in English, turning slightly so that he was facing Bradley now, though he did not move from where he stood beside Amara, "are the most frightening people in Shenzhen. More frightening than the Party Secretary. More frightening than the tax bureau." He paused. "My own mother was one of them. So I speak from experience."
Bradley unfolded his arms. It seemed to cost him a great deal of effort. His face had gone pale beneath the good tan, and there was a small muscle working at the corner of his jaw.
"Chairman Lin," he said. His voice came out rougher than he meant. He cleared his throat. "Welcome. It's an honor. We weren't expecting you until one o'clock."
"I know," said Lin. "I'm always early." He folded his hands behind his back. "When I was a young engineer, my first manager told me something that I've never forgotten. He said, Always arrive early to meet a partner. If you arrive on time, you see what he wants you to see. If you arrive early, you see what he is." He let that settle for a moment. "I've found it very useful advice. Most of the time I see nothing at all. Today was unusual."
Nobody said anything. The fountain went on murmuring. Somewhere at the far end of the hall a door swung closed in the kitchen.
"If I understood the terms correctly," Lin said mildly, "and I believe I did, since I was standing at the door the whole time and the acoustics in this building are excellent, you offered this young woman one hundred thousand dollars if she could say a single sentence in Chinese. In front of witnesses." He glanced at Teddy, and at Kenji with his tray, and at the elderly couple behind the boxwood hedge, who were no longer even pretending to eat. "By my count, she said three sentences in Mandarin and two in Cantonese. Five sentences. I may have missed one. Her Cantonese is quite fast." He looked at Bradley with an expression of courteous neutrality. "I'm afraid you've lost, Mr. Kincaid."
The tall woman in the steel-framed glasses leaned slightly toward the young man beside her and murmured something in Mandarin, very quietly, without moving her lips much. Now it gets interesting.
Amara heard it. She kept her face perfectly still.
Bradley looked down at the table. The brick of money lay where he had left it, on the dark basalt beside the nearest white plate, in its yellow paper band. One of the porcelain fish lay a quarter inch out of line beside it, knocked sideways by the force of the blow.
Then he looked at Amara.
And Owen, who had worked for Bradley Kincaid for four years, who had watched him in board meetings and pitch meetings and late-night crisis calls, who had watched him charm investors and dismantle journalists and fire a vice president over a Caesar salad, saw something happen to his boss's face that he had never seen before. Bradley looked at Amara, and for what seemed to be the first time, he actually saw her. Not a waitress. Not a mix-up. Not a problem standing between him and his lunch. A person. A tall young woman of twenty-seven in a cheap white shirt and a black apron, with tired eyes and her hair pinned back, who got up every morning in the dark and rode two buses to stand in this beautiful room and carry plates for people like him, people who almost never looked at her, and who had just been humiliated in front of a dozen strangers by a man who had not even asked her name.
Bradley took a checkbook from the inside right pocket of his jacket. Owen had never seen him use a checkbook. He had not known Bradley owned one. Bradley uncapped a pen and held it over the page, and then stopped.
"I'm sorry," he said to Amara. "I don't know your name."
"Amara Adeyemi."
"Could you spell the last name, please?"
She spelled it for him. He wrote it out carefully, letter by letter, and then wrote a figure, ninety thousand dollars, and signed it and tore the check from the book. Then he picked up the brick from the table, and held the two of them out to her together, the check on top of the cash, the full hundred thousand.
"You won," he said. "Fair and square."
* * *
Amara did not take it.
She looked at the money in his hand for a moment, and then she looked at him.
"No, thank you," she said.
Bradley blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"I didn't accept your bet, Mr. Kincaid. You made it. I didn't agree to anything. And I didn't do any work." She said it plainly, without heat. "I spoke my own language. Nobody should be paid a hundred thousand dollars for speaking their own language. It isn't a trick. It's just who I am."
Behind her, Teddy made a faint strangled sound.
"However," Amara went on, "I'm not only a server here. I'm a trained interpreter, and I'll be a qualified one in eleven months. Your interpreter is stuck in Vancouver. If you'd like me to interpret this lunch for you, I'd be glad to. My rate is a hundred and fifty dollars an hour, with a two-hour minimum. You can pay it through The Glasshouse. Mr. Marchetti will invoice you."