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By Root 422 0

enormous potted palm, and immediately Vinh begins bringing out food, dish after dish, each time scooping up the empty plates and disappearing before Marcel can thank her. He’s never seen anything like it: spring rolls with black mushroom filling, rice baked in halves of a melon, a whole carp steamed in coconut milk. Ford serves them both, and eats without speaking; between courses he folds his hands on the table and breathes in deeply, staring out the window. All the better, Marcel thinks. The chopsticks are black lacquerware, with pointed ends, as slippery as knitting needles. When Ford isn’t looking he shovels fish onto them with his fingers, trying not to stab himself on the tiny bones.

I’ll be the first to tell you I didn’t want this job, Ford says finally, leaning back in his chair, after they’ve finished the last course. I never was much for the international side of the business. Didn’t think it was in the firm’s interest to be here in the first place. But it came up just after my divorce, in 1995, and I wanted out of San Francisco. So I thought it was just the luck of the draw. And it was.

You seem to like it here.

Hell, Ford says. I’ll tell you something. This position is supposed to rotate two years from now. But I’m going to ask them to make me permanent. I’ll even take a lesser share if they want.

A salty taste rises in Marcel’s throat. I would have thought that you’d want to go back, he says. Five years is a long time.

Ford gives him a slow, appraising look, and for the first time Marcel notices the puffiness around his eyes, the pouches at the corners of his mouth. Not so long, he says. Not when you’re my age. I feel like I’m just getting started.

Marcel nods, wondering if he’s supposed to understand what that means.

Peabody Stein needs a new strategy for Asia. Ford tears off part of his napkin and divides it into little squares, scattering them around the tablecloth. There is a faint buzz of anger in his voice: like a wasp trapped by a window. Right now we’re operating on an outpost model, he says. We go wherever our American clients go. But the thing is, for every American company looking for a market in Asia there are three Asian companies that want a toehold in the U.S. You’ve got lots of young executives here that were educated at Harvard and MIT. They speak English just like we do, they eat pizza, they watch the Bulls on satellite. The problem is that we’re not going after that market. The only people we’re interested in are the Americans who think that the rest of the world is waiting to buy what they have to sell.

A breeze rises through the windows, smelling of oyster shells and seaweed.

But that’s our primary client base, Marcel says. We’d have to do that without alienating them, right? That wouldn’t be easy.

You know what I like about Hong Kong? Ford says. People here are smart. You see the stock indexes and the exchange rates right on the front page of the newspaper. He brushes the napkin fragments into his palm, and lets them fall over an empty dish, like tiny snowflakes. They aren’t hypocrites the way we Americans are. They understand that money is like water: it flows everywhere, but it never changes. Doesn’t matter what language it’s in, or what country it comes from. If you can trade it, sell it, or exchange it, it’s all the same. That’s why they call it liquid assets, right?

Marcel presses his lips together to stifle an answer: Aren’t you forgetting the regulators? We’re still members of the bar, right? Hold on, he thinks. Why is he making this easy for me?

But enough about that, Ford says. Tell me about you, Marcel. How’s the firm working out? Are you happy?

He forces himself to smile. It’s hard to say, he says. Sometimes I wonder where the last five years have gone. This is my first time off in I don’t know when. I didn’t take a week off all last summer. Working on the Geosynch bankruptcy. Thirty thousand pages of depositions.

I heard about that. They said you guys were logging all kinds of hours.

Sure, he says. The biggest severance payment in California history. Full entailment.