Gao Peng had no diplomacy to spare. He wanted numbers. If the timetable slipped by the amount the Chinese conditions allowed, what did the carrying costs become? If the parks contribution was not committed by the city but expected from the developers, whose column did it belong in? He asked Simone to stop translating adjectives and bring him the verbs β who pays, who builds, who indemnifies, who walks away. She liked him for it. Skepticism that specific was a form of respect for everyone else's intelligence.
She worked past midnight that night, chasing Gao's verbs through a remediation schedule cross-referenced to an insurance exhibit cross-referenced to a letter dated fourteen months earlier, written before the chrome-plating works' records had been fully digitized. Her economics training kept surfacing like a tide: follow the liability, not the language. Language could be embarrassed. Liability simply waited.
By the third day the small discrepancies had company. A groundwater monitoring requirement present in the appendix was absent in the summary's cost table. A benzene threshold was quoted correctly in Chinese and, in English, attached to the wrong standard β the less stringent one β in a way that changed what cleanup would legally require. A hexavalent chromium remediation estimate appeared twice with two different figures, and only the lower one had traveled into the projections Gao had been given at dinner.
Simone sat back. Her shoulders ached. On the table, her mother's old dictionary lay open where she had left it, its spine cracked from years of kitchen-table lessons. Vivienne had taught her that a language was not a code to crack but a house to enter respectfully, room by room. Enter like you were invited twice. Simone had entered this house of paper respectfully. Now she was beginning to map where its walls had been moved in the dark.
The call that evening was shorter and colder. Sun no longer wondered aloud; she stated, quietly, that the Shanghai group could not sign a document set it could not reconcile with itself. Gao said his recommendation, as matters stood, would have to be suspension. Liang said nothing for a long moment, and in the silence Simone heard the whole Foundry Mile deal β the towers, the promenade, a billion dollars of other people's money β balanced on the edge of her kitchen table in Harlem.
"Continue," Liang told her at last. "To the end of the set. If there is a worst page, Miss Baptiste, I would rather meet it from you than from a newspaper."
She found it an hour later, alone, with the radiator ticking and her father's breathing audible through the thin wall.
It was not in the environmental appendix at all. That was the elegance of it, if elegance was a word that could survive contact with something so cynical. It sat in a cost-sharing schedule near the back, in a subordinate clause attached to a definition, written in Chinese of such dense, legalistic abstraction that Simone read it three times before she allowed herself to understand it β and then read the English version and felt the room go very still, because the English version did not contain it at all.
Simone found the fatal clause β the one that could kill the deal or save it.
Chapter 13 β The Clock
The clause reorganized everything else in the binders into a single, legible story.
Buried in a definition in the cost-sharing schedule, it provided that if environmental remediation of the Foundry Mile site exceeded a stated threshold β a threshold the honest Chinese appendix all but guaranteed would be exceeded, given the hexavalent chromium and benzene in the ground β then the excess cost, and the liability for any delay the cleanup caused, transferred automatically to the Shanghai investors. Not shared. Transferred. Crowe Atlantic Development would keep control of the project, keep its fees, keep its name on the towers in the renderings, while the men and woman who had flown across the Pacific to fund it inherited the poison and the bill for digging it out of Hudson waterfront soil.
The English version simply had no such clause. In its place sat a bland sentence about costs being handled in accordance with the parties' respective obligations, which meant nothing, which was precisely what it was designed to mean.
Simone called Liang before she had finished rereading it. Some findings deserved to be delivered still warm.
By nine that morning she was back in the hotel suite, with the clause translated three ways on a single page β literal, idiomatic, and in the plain English she would use for a jury β and the room had changed around her. Gao Peng had a calculator out and no expression at all. Sun Jiayi sat very straight, her diplomacy now worn like formal dress, beautiful and unmistakably armored. Liang listened to Simone's explanation without interrupting, then read her page twice, then set it down with a care that told her more than anger would have.
"The signing is tonight," Sun said at last, in English. "Midnight. The lenders' commitment expires at midnight. Mr. Crowe has reminded us of this four times since breakfast."
"He reminded you," Gao said, not looking up from his numbers, "because the clock is the only argument he has left."
Simone could feel the clock in the room like weather. If midnight passed unsigned, the financing Crowe had assembled would lapse. Renewing it would take months and cost millions, assuming it could be renewed at all with a collapsed Shanghai partnership in the newspapers. Crowe Atlantic could lose the Foundry Mile in a single day, not to a rival, but to a clause its own side had buried and a waitress had dug up between shifts.
At eleven, Crowe arrived at the suite.
Simone had seen him commanding a dining room, performing certainty for an audience of three guests and a staff trained not to react. She had not seen him afraid. He wore it badly β too loud at the door, too expansive with Liang's assistant, his color high, his jokes landing in silence and staying there. He carried a leather folder he did not open. When his eyes found Simone at the table with her binders, his face performed three things in rapid sequence β disbelief that she was still in this story, contempt that she was sitting down in it, and then, unmistakably, the recognition that the story might now run through her.
"What is she doing here?" he asked the room generally.
"Reading," Liang said, in a tone Simone had never heard him use. "Something you should perhaps have done."