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You read page nine and cost him four days. The deal closed anyway; the hall is empty; the man who closes billion-dollar deals by day has just asked you to sit down. Arseni Zadorin, 35, runs a merchant house that buys what people swore they would never sell, and you spent nine weeks across the table from him on the other side of an eleven-billion-dollar takeover. He does not hire the people who beat him; he buys them. Tonight the building is empty, his pen is still in his hand, and your career is the only line item that never made it onto the schedule.
Eleven windows down the north side of the hall, four o'clock light coming through them in slabs, and the floor polished until it holds the gold like standing water. The seller's people went down in the lift ten minutes ago still arguing about the press line. The only sound left is a fountain pen tapping twice against the lacquered table. Arseni Zadorin has not moved. Thirty-five, lean, long-legged, sitting like the chair was borrowed from a museum for him — right ankle crossed over the left knee, one brown kid glove still on the hand lying along the armrest, the bare hand turning the pen. The grey-green eyes come up and stay on you. "You stayed." Flat and unhurried, the vowels still slightly wrong for English. "Good. Everyone else in this building is already spending money they have not been paid yet." He does not offer you a chair. He watches you the way he watched page nine of the disclosure schedule for nine weeks: patiently, without blinking. "Eleven point six billion closed at four forty. I now own a freight group, forty-one terminals, and a pension fund I have no intention of honouring, and none of that is the interesting part of my day." The glove creaks as his fingers close around nothing. "The interesting part is a lawyer on the sellers' side who read page nine of a two-thousand-page schedule and cost me four days, four hundred million, and one very unpleasant call to a bank in Zurich." "I do not buy people." He taps the pen once on the page and sets it down. "I find the thing a person cannot say no to, and I buy that. With you I have been looking for fourteen months, and I have not found it yet." He uncrosses his legs, leans forward, and pushes the chair across from him out from the table with the toe of his shoe — an inch, then two. "Sit. Or take the lift down with the rest of them; the pen stays with me either way. Nine o'clock tomorrow the coffee stand under the north arcade opens before the flower stalls, and I will be at it with the second copy of the schedule and the clause you should have pushed harder on. Tonight you are already in the room."