"Teddy." Bradley did not look at him. He was still smiling, but it had thinned. "With respect. I asked for a Chinese speaker. What I've got is a waitress with a story I can't check. The chairman of a forty-billion-dollar company is going to walk up that path in fifty minutes, and I have—" He stopped himself. Something passed over his face and was gone. "I have a great deal riding on this lunch. I need to know who's at my table."
Looks the part, Amara thought. Carl in an office somewhere. Bradley Kincaid in a chair at the head of her table. Two men she had never met before today, and they had both looked at her for a second, and decided.
"I don't have time for this," Bradley said.
* * *
"Then you'll have to take my word for it," said Amara.
Bradley looked at her.
"No," he said slowly. "I don't think I will."
He was a big man, six foot two, broad through the shoulders, with the particular smooth well-fed solidity of someone who had had money for twenty years and good food and good doctors and good tailors, and he moved now with a sudden decisive economy that made everyone on the path flinch. He reached into the left inside pocket of his jacket, over his heart, and took out something, and brought his whole forearm down on the table.
The sound was enormous. The basalt took the blow and threw it back up into the glass, a flat hard crack that went ringing up through the iron ribs of the roof and came back down from forty feet. The plates jumped. One of the porcelain fish skittered sideways a quarter inch. Behind the boxwood hedge the elderly woman dropped her spoon into her soup with a small splash.
When Bradley took his arm away there was a strap of money lying on the dark stone beside the nearest plate. Hundred-dollar bills, an inch thick, in a yellow paper band.
He kept his hand flat on it a moment longer. Then he stood up, slowly, and came around the end of the table and stopped on the gravel in front of Amara, in the shaft of sunlight, close enough that she could smell his aftershave.
"Ten thousand dollars," he said pleasantly. "Call it a deposit. I'll write you a check for the rest." He smiled. "One hundred thousand dollars says you can't say one sentence in Chinese."
"Mr. Kincaid," said Teddy faintly. "Please. This is not—"
"Teddy, stay out of this." Bradley did not take his eyes off Amara. "Here are the rules. It has to be real Chinese. Not ni hao. Not xie xie. Nothing off a fortune cookie. A real sentence. Owen will check it on his phone." Behind him, Owen, looking stricken, fumbled his phone out of his pocket and opened a translation app. "If it's real, the money's yours. All of it. If it's not, you go back in the kitchen, Teddy finds me somebody who actually speaks the language, and we never talk about this again." He folded his arms. "Fair?"
Nobody on the path said anything. The fountain murmured. The bronze heron looked into the water.
Bradley stood with his arms folded and his weight back on his heels and his chin up, and waited.
It was his stance. He had used it on bankers and venture capitalists and union negotiators and once, memorably, on a deputy secretary of energy in a conference room in Washington. State the terms. Make them final. Fold your arms. Wait. Let the silence do the work. Sooner or later, the other side cracks. They always crack. A pair of fours, a strap of cash, a stare. Kings and nines folded.
His back was to the long gravel path that led to the arched main doorway of the hall. The money lay on the table behind him.
* * *
Amara had been looked at like this her whole life.
She had been looked at like this when she was six and stepped off a plane at Shenzhen Bao'an with her mother's hand in hers and a backpack with a cartoon giraffe on it, and the woman at passport control had stared at her for so long that her mother had finally said, politely, Is there a problem? She had been looked at like this every day for a year at Hongli Primary School, by classmates who stared and teachers who didn't know where to seat her and parents at the gate who pulled their children closer as she passed. She had been looked at like this when she was seven, in the schoolyard, in October, by a ring of older boys, until an old woman with a cane came across the street from the noodle shop and made them stop.
She had been looked at like this at 6:02 that morning, by a man named Carl, through a computer screen.
She did not look at the money. She did not look at Teddy or Owen or Kenji or the couple behind the hedge. She did not flinch. She looked at Bradley Kincaid, calmly and without hurry, and let the silence go on, and found to her own mild surprise that she was not in any rush to end it.
That was when she saw them.
At the far end of the hall, in the tall arched doorway where the main entrance opened onto the gravel, a small group of people was standing very still. They had not just arrived. She could tell from the way they stood, the stillness of people who have been watching something for a while and have decided not to interrupt it. Five people in dark suits, four men and a woman. And at the front of them, slightly apart, a slight silver-haired man of about sixty-five in a plain charcoal jacket, no tie, rimless glasses, with a folded newspaper tucked under one arm.
He was looking straight down the length of the lemon-tree path at her.
Bradley did not see him. Bradley had his back to the door.
The silver-haired man met her eyes across a hundred feet of gravel and glass and sunlight. And very slightly, almost imperceptibly, he raised one eyebrow.
Amara looked at him for a moment longer. Then she turned her eyes back to Bradley Kincaid, and she spoke.