Zhou folded his hands on the table. The deal, he explained, was older than the dinner at Table Twelve. Harborpoint Landing had been negotiated for nearly two years: letters of intent, memoranda, flights in both directions, lawyers who billed by the minute and translated by the hour. The Shanghai group was not buying land, exactly. They were buying into Cole Development Group's vision of it β the towers, the marina, the public esplanade β and into a set of guarantees about what the ground underneath it all would cost them.
"And the ground," Maya said, in Mandarin, "is the problem."
Sun Hao made a small sound that was not quite disagreement. Zhou inclined his head.
"The ground is one problem," he said. "Time is another. Mr. Cole wishes to sign before his financing window closes. His lenders are β " He searched for the word, and Liu supplied it in English: "Impatient."
"In my experience," Zhou said, "impatient men sign documents they have not read."
Maya opened her folder. She had marked the appendix with three slips of paper, not highlighters β she had not wanted the pages to look like a student's homework β and she laid out what she had found the way she would have laid out a problem set at Berkeley, back when problem sets were the largest trouble she could imagine. The Chinese appendix named the contamination plainly: lead, petroleum residue, old shipyard fill, a remediation estimate with a range wide enough to drive a tower crane through. The English summary, which was what Cole's own board packet quoted, called it minor soil discoloration and carried a single low figure as if it were settled.
"I cannot tell from one appendix," she said, "whether this was a translation error or a decision. But I can tell you the two versions do not say the same thing, and the clause about who pays lives in the version your team received in English, not in ours."
She stopped. She had practiced saying ours less. It slipped anyway.
Sun spoke for the first time, in English, rapid and flat. "Our firm employs translators. In Shanghai and here. Licensed translators."
"I know," Maya said.
"Then why did they not β "
"That," Zhou said mildly, "is what I asked myself on the drive back last night." Sun's mouth tightened, but he did not argue with the older man. Zhou looked at Maya again. "There are many documents. Site reports. The environmental study in full. The cost-sharing addendum. Letters from the city. I am told there are more than nine hundred pages, and perhaps a third of them exist in both languages. My concern is simple, Miss Thompson. I do not know which third agrees with itself."
The room went quiet in the particular way rooms did when money was being discussed without the word money.
What he wanted, when he finally laid it out, was not a favor and not a performance. He wanted her to read. Not the summaries β the documents themselves, Chinese against English, line by line, and to tell his group, in writing, where they diverged and what the divergences would cost. His own translators would then verify her work; he said this openly, and she respected him the more for it. He did not ask her because she was a novelty. He asked her, he said, because she was the only person in the Compass Room the night before who had read a page and cared that it was wrong.
"Mr. Cole introduced you to us as entertainment," Zhou said. "You were the only one at that table doing the work of the table."
Maya felt the compliment land and, with it, a warning she gave herself: do not let a kind man's respect make you cheap. She thought of the transfer glowing on her phone the night before. A hundred thousand dollars β already half-allocated in her head to the hospital, the roof, the quiet, accumulating interest on debts her father pretended not to know the totals of. This was different money. This would be earned money, in her own field, with her own name on it.
"You understand," she said carefully, "that I am still employed at The Lantern House. And that Mr. Cole β "
"Mr. Cole does not know you are here," Liu said. "He will be told today that we require a full bilingual review before signing. He will not be told, yet, who we have asked to begin it."
That, Maya thought, was both protection and a trap. If she found nothing else, she was a footnote. If she found something real, she would be standing between Harrison Cole and a billion dollars with nothing but a folder and good Mandarin, and Harrison Cole had already shown her exactly what he thought she was worth as a person, as opposed to a bet.
She looked down at her tea. It had gone the color of pale amber. At the kitchen table, years ago, her mother had drilled her on the vocabulary of contracts before she had taught her the vocabulary of love poetry, because Rose Thompson had believed a woman should be able to read what she was signing in any language a man might slide across a table to her.
"I will do it," Maya said.
Zhou's shoulders eased, just visibly.
"But not as a favor," she said, "and not as the girl from the restaurant who happened to be useful. If I do this, I do it as a consultant. I will need a letter that says so β my name, the scope of the work, that I report what I find to your group directly, and a fee that reflects the work, agreed before I open page one. I will need access to both versions of everything, not summaries. And if I find something that changes the deal, I will say it in the room, to everyone, not in a hallway afterward."
Sun's eyebrows rose. Liu wrote something down at last. Zhou, after a moment, smiled the small, grave smile she remembered from the moment he had risen to his feet at Table Twelve.
"Miss Thompson," he said, "I would have been disappointed in any other answer."
She stood when he stood, and shook his hand like a person who had set her terms and been heard, because she had agreed β but she had made it unmistakably clear that she was a consultant now, not a curiosity.
Chapter 12 β Paper Walls
For three days, Maya Thompson lived inside other people's sentences.
The hotel gave them a smaller room on the same floor as Mr. Zhou's suite, a windowless interior room meant for depositions and difficult meetings, and someone β Daniel, she assumed β had stocked it with the kind of care she recognized from good restaurant work: water that was refilled before it emptied, pencils already sharpened, a kettle, two kinds of tea, and no music, ever. The documents arrived in banker's boxes and then, when she asked, as a hard drive in a padded envelope, because nine hundred pages turned out to be an optimistic lie. The true count, when she built her own index on the first morning, was closer to fourteen hundred, and a third of them existed in both languages the way a menu existed in both languages at a tourist restaurant: nominally, and with casualties.
She worked the way she had been taught to work at two tables in her life. From Berkeley: build the spreadsheet first, argue later. From her mother: read the Chinese aloud, quietly, because your ear caught what your eye forgave.
So she read aloud, in a murmur, for hours, until her throat ached the way it had after double shifts, and she built her table column by column. Document. Date. Author. Chinese version, page and line. English version, page and line. Difference. Consequence, in dollars where dollars could be known, and in plain words where they could not.
The first day's differences were insulting in their smallness. A completion date that read the fifteenth in Chinese and the fiftieth β no, the fifteenth with a typo, she decided, but she flagged it anyway. A materials specification downgraded in translation from a named standard to "or equivalent," a phrase she underlined three times because she had learned at nineteen, in a lecture hall with a leaking ceiling, that or equivalent was where budgets went to be buried. A letter from the city about public access to the esplanade that was warm and noncommittal in English and considerably less warm, and equally noncommittal, in Chinese, in ways that mattered.