It was a single slab of dark gray Oregon basalt, twenty feet long and four feet wide, unpolished, the surface left rough and matte so that it looked less like furniture than like something geological, a piece of the earth that had happened to rise up in this spot. It seated sixteen. It had been lowered in through the roof by crane during the restoration, before the last panes were set, because there was no other way to get it inside, and it weighed so much that the floor beneath it had had to be reinforced with steel. Above it, the iron ribs arched forty feet overhead. It was the best table in the house and quite possibly the best table in the city, and it was booked, almost always, four months in advance. Weddings. Anniversaries. Funeral lunches. Deals.
It was booked today.
Amara came in through the kitchen at seven-thirty, and before she had even gotten her apron tied, Teddy Marchetti was coming down the central path toward her at the closest thing to a run she had ever seen him attempt.
Teddy was fifty-four, short and round and bald as an egg, with a pair of half-moon reading glasses on a beaded cord around his neck and a clipboard that he was never, under any circumstances, seen without. He had managed The Glasshouse since the day it opened. Before that he had been a maître d' in Manhattan for twenty years, at restaurants whose names made other restaurant people go briefly quiet, and before that, as a boy, he had cleared tables in a seafood place on the waterfront in Naples, where, he liked to say, he had learned everything worth knowing about the business by the age of fourteen, mostly by being shouted at.
He believed that a restaurant was a theater. He said so often. He said the performance began the moment a guest's foot touched the gravel at the front door and did not end until the car door closed behind them at the curb, and that everything between those two moments, every glass and every napkin and every word, was either part of the show or a mistake. He was dramatic and exacting and sentimental and occasionally absurd, and he remembered the birthdays of every member of his staff, and he was, without any serious competition, the best boss Amara had ever had.
"Amara," he said, arriving slightly out of breath. "Thank God. Come. Walk with me."
She walked with him. He set off back up the central path at speed, clipboard clutched to his chest, his glasses bouncing on their cord.
"The Long Table," he said. "Twelve-thirty. Fourteen covers. Kincaid Grid Storage."
"I don't know what that is."
"Neither do I, really. Batteries. American batteries, for the electric grid, the big ones, the size of shipping containers. They're hosting a guest." He lowered his voice, although there was no one within thirty feet of them except Kenji, raking gravel by the fountain. "Lin Weiguo. Chairman of Huaxin New Energy."
The name went through her like a small bell. "Huaxin," she said. "From Shenzhen."
Teddy stopped walking and looked at her over his glasses. "You know them?"
"Everyone in Shenzhen knows them. They're one of the biggest battery companies in the world. Their headquarters is in Pingshan. When I was a kid they were still small. My friend's father worked in one of their factories." She frowned. "Lin Weiguo is coming here? For lunch?"
"For lunch," said Teddy. "With fourteen people. At my table." He began walking again. "I read about it this morning. Wall Street Journal. Something about a deal, a factory, tariffs, I don't really understand it, I skipped to the part where they mentioned us. They mentioned us, Amara. 'A private lunch at The Glasshouse in the Presidio.' The Journal."
"That's wonderful, Teddy."
"It's a nightmare," Teddy said fervently. "The host, Mr. Bradley Kincaid, has called me every day for two weeks. Every day. Twice on Thursday. He wants to know about the wine, the fish, the seating, the light, whether the fountain can be turned off, whether the fountain can be turned up. On Monday he told me that if anything goes wrong at this lunch, anything at all, he'll make sure every person he knows in this city hears about it, and he made it clear that this is a great many people." He shook his head. "I've been threatened by better. I've been threatened by men who owned half of Fifth Avenue. But never with such stamina."
They had reached the end of the lemon-tree path. The Long Table lay ahead of them, bare and gray in the milky morning light, the basalt faintly damp-looking, the way it always did when the fog was in.
"I want you on it," Teddy said. "You, Rosie, and Kenji. Rosie on wine, Kenji clearing. You lead."
"Of course."
"Good. Good." He turned to face her. He took his glasses off and let them drop on their cord, and then he did something she had never seen him do before, which was to look slightly guilty. "There's one other thing."
She waited.
"Mr. Kincaid's assistant called me at seven o'clock this morning," Teddy said. "Their interpreter, a very famous woman apparently, a Dr. Liu, is stuck in Vancouver. The fog. Every flight on the coast is grounded. She won't make it. They've tried everyone, every agency, and they can't get anyone to the Presidio before two o'clock. And the chairman arrives at one."
He looked at her. Amara looked back at him. Somewhere behind them the fountain went on murmuring to itself, and the bronze heron went on looking disappointed.
"Teddy," she said slowly. "What did you do?"
Teddy put his glasses back on, which was what he did when he wanted something to hide behind.
"Mr. Kincaid's assistant asked me," he said, "whether anyone on my staff spoke Chinese. Someone who could sit at the end of the table and help with the menu, the wine, keep the chairman comfortable until they find a real interpreter. Someone to fill the gap." He hesitated. "And I said yes. I said I had a server whose Mandarin was as good as a native speaker's. I said it before I even thought about it. I'm sorry. I should have asked you first."
Amara said nothing.