Bradley stared at her. The money was still in his outstretched hand.
"And if you want to do something with that," Amara said, nodding at it, "my colleagues Rosie and Kenji are going to be covering my tables this afternoon, and theirs too, so they'll be doing twice the work. You could tip them."
At the edge of the path, Teddy Marchetti had gone from gray to white to something approaching a pale lavender. He was clutching his clipboard against his chest with both arms, as though it were the last floating object from a shipwreck.
Lin Weiguo said nothing. But he was looking at Amara now with a different expression, one the tall woman in the steel-framed glasses had seen on his face only three times before in the nineteen years she had worked beside him. Once, when the first Huaxin cell passed its safety certification in 1999. Once, at his mother's funeral. And once, on a cold morning in 2011, when a young engineer on the night shift in Pingshan had walked into his office uninvited and told him, without any softening at all, that the new production line he was so proud of was going to catch fire, and why. The engineer had been right. Lin had promoted her that afternoon. Her name was Fang Lihua, and she was now the chief technology officer of the company.
It was a look of pride. And something under the pride that was harder to name. Something that looked, in that particular light, almost like being moved.
* * *
Bradley stood with the check and the cash in his hand, held out, and nobody took them, and the moment stretched until it became something no one could watch.
"A hundred and fifty an hour," said Lin finally, in English, conversationally, as though discussing the price of tea, "is extremely reasonable, Mr. Kincaid. Dr. Liu, I happen to know, charges four thousand dollars a day. And she would not have been able to tell you about the aunties of Fuhua Road." He paused. "I would accept the offer, if I were you."
Bradley looked at Lin. Then he looked down at the money in his own hand as though he had forgotten what it was. Slowly, he folded the check in half and put it back into his checkbook, and put the checkbook and the brick back into the inside of his jacket, over his heart.
Then he turned to Amara.
"Ms. Adeyemi," he said. His voice was quieter than she had heard it. "Would you interpret for me this afternoon? Please."
"Yes," said Amara.
She reached behind her back and untied the double knot of her apron, and lifted it over her head, and folded it in half and then in half again, and handed it to Teddy. He took it from her in both hands, carefully, the way you would take a flag at a funeral.
Lin waited until she was done. Then, before anyone could move toward the table, he turned to Amara and said, in Mandarin, "Before we sit down, would you interpret something for me? I want Mr. Kincaid to hear it exactly. I could say it in English, but I would rather it came from you."
"Of course," said Amara.
He turned to face Bradley. He spoke in Mandarin, in a calm, conversational voice, a sentence or two at a time, and Amara carried it across into English half a beat behind him, exactly, in her working voice, without adding anything or taking anything away.
"I came to San Francisco to buy a factory," Lin said. "My team in Shenzhen, forty people, has spent eight months studying your documents. Your financial statements. Your production records. Your contracts, your permits, your debt. They know your factory better than you do. I could tell you the defect rate on your third coating line to two decimal places." He paused, and Amara paused with him. "But there are things you cannot see in documents. We have a saying in China. Look at small things to understand big things. When you want to know how a man runs a company of four hundred people, you watch how he treats one person who cannot help him."
Bradley stood very still.
"Dr. Grace Liu is an old friend of mine," Lin went on. "We have known each other for twenty years. She called me last night from Vancouver to apologize that she would not be here. And she told me something about you, Mr. Kincaid. She said, He is not a bad man. But he values people only for what they can do for him." He let the words land, and Amara let them land with him, and did not soften them by a syllable. "I told her I would decide for myself."
Lin looked at Bradley for a long moment, and when he spoke again, his voice did not change at all.
"Our meeting did not begin at one o'clock," he said. "It began fifteen minutes ago. When you told this young woman you had asked for somebody who speaks Chinese, and not her."
He let Amara finish. Then he switched, unexpectedly, back into English, and his voice was suddenly warm and pleasant, the voice of a guest.
"Now," he said. "Shall we eat? I've been told the fish here is excellent."
* * *
They sat down at 12:31. Owen noted the time automatically, the way he noted everything, because noting things was what kept the panic in its box.
He had spent two evenings that week on the seating chart. He had printed it on card stock and laminated it. It was in his left-hand bag, in a plastic sleeve. It placed Bradley at the head of the Long Table, in the heavy oak chair, with Chairman Lin in the place of honor on his right, and the rest of the two delegations arranged down both sides in alternating order of seniority, according to principles that Grace Liu had explained to him over the phone for forty-five minutes and that he had written down in a notebook and underlined.
He did not take it out of his bag.