Chen Popo listened to all of it without interrupting once. In the eleven years Amara had known her, she had never once listened to anything for that long without interrupting. The cat woke up halfway through, looked at the phone with disdain, and went back to sleep.
When Amara had finished, Chen Popo was quiet for a while.
"This Chairman," she said finally. "Lin. His mother sold dried fish on Fuhua Road?"
"For thirty years. He said."
Chen Popo narrowed her magnified eyes, thinking. "There was a dried-fish woman on Fuhua Road," she said slowly. "Tiny. Gold tooth here." She tapped her own upper canine. "Very loud. In 1994 I caught her putting her thumb on the scale. On my squid. I told her so, in front of everybody. She told me to go and boil my head. Then she gave me the squid for free." She nodded to herself, satisfied. "If that was his mother, he comes from good people."
Amara laughed so hard she had to put the phone down on the bed for a moment.
"The money," Chen Popo went on, when Amara had picked it up again. "You were right not to take it. That money had a hook in it. That kind of money, a man throws it on a table to make you small. You take it, you're a fish on his line for the rest of your life." She stroked the cat. "But giving it to the waitress. That was right too. The hook only catches people who think they're too good for honest work. That woman, Rosie, the hook won't catch her. She'll spend it on her grandchildren and forget his face by Sunday."
"I hope so."
"I know so." Chen Popo leaned toward the camera, so that her face filled the screen again, the pink glasses enormous. "And you. You stood there. You didn't cry, you didn't shout, you didn't run away. You stood there in the light and you made him look at you." She sat back. "Good. Your mother would have done the same." A pause. "Well. Your mother would have made him eat the money. With chopsticks. One bill at a time."
Amara laughed again, and felt, under the laughter, her eyes go hot.
"Now go to sleep," said Chen Popo. "You have a factory tomorrow. Batteries. Very complicated. You'll need your head. Eat something first. You're too thin."
"I love you, Popo."
"Everybody loves me," said Chen Popo. "It's exhausting." And she hung up.
* * *
Bradley had offered to send a car for her in the morning. Owen had texted at six that evening with a pickup time and a driver's name and a license plate number. Amara had texted back, politely, Thank you, but I'll make my own way.
She wanted to arrive the way the people who worked there arrived.
So she got up at 4:45 in the dark, and drank her Tieguanyin out of the WORLD'S OKAYEST DAUGHTER mug, and caught the 5:40 BART train from Daly City. It was nearly empty at that hour: a few nurses coming off shift, a man asleep with his head against the window, a young woman in a hard hat and a reflective vest eating a granola bar. She changed at Bay Fair, and sat watching the dark warehouses and the lit freeways of the East Bay slide past, and got off at Fremont at 6:30, and walked the last mile and a half along the edge of a six-lane road with no sidewalk, while the sky over the hills turned from black to gray to a thin cold pink.
At 6:52 she came around the corner of a refrigerated lettuce warehouse and saw it.
The Kincaid Grid Storage factory stood at the eastern edge of the bay, on flat reclaimed land between the lettuce warehouse and a stretch of salt marsh where egrets stood motionless in the shallow water like folded white napkins. It was a quarter of a mile long. White corrugated steel, windowless, with a long low roofline and huge loading doors along one side. On the end wall, faded by five years of sun and salt air to a pale washed-out blue, were the words KINCAID GRID STORAGE, in tall letters, and beneath them, smaller, almost invisible now, the slogan from the Aspen talk: Built Here. Built Now.
The parking lot was nearly empty. A few dozen cars at the far end near a side door, the night shift and the early shift. Gulls stood in a row along the roofline.
It was, Amara thought, standing at the edge of the lot with her hands in her coat pockets, one of the loneliest buildings she had ever seen.
* * *
At 6:55, a black Suburban with tinted windows pulled into the lot and stopped by the main entrance.
Lin Weiguo got out of the back. He was wearing the same plain gray jacket as the day before, and he had a white hard hat tucked under one arm like a man carrying a cake. Dr. Fang Lihua got out the other side. She was wearing steel-toed work boots and a pair of clear safety glasses pushed up on top of her short gray hair, and she looked, Amara thought, about ten years younger and a great deal happier than she had looked at the Long Table. She looked like someone who had been let out of a meeting and into a laboratory. Zhou Jian climbed out of the front passenger seat with his small black notebook already open.
And waiting by the main door, where he had been standing, Amara learned later, since 5:30, was Bradley Kincaid.
He was wearing jeans and work boots and a gray polo shirt with the Kincaid Grid Storage logo embroidered on the chest. The shirt was brand new. It still had the creases from the packaging, sharp square lines across the chest and down the sleeves, and it was slightly too tight across the shoulders. He was holding a hard hat and a pair of safety glasses. He looked like a man dressed as a factory worker for a costume party who had arrived and found out it was not a costume party.