Secrets of the Apple (21 page)

“To keep relationships even. Yep, I’ve read about it,” she said.

Ryoki nodded. “I personally have to give a lot of gifts. It’s time consuming and—”

“And you want me to be Santa’s elf.”

“Exactly.”

“Wow, personal shopper,” she said flatly. “Where’s that lady with the plastered hair? She’ll be so jealous.”

“It has to be done and those are personal accounts. Just keep everything in your household books,” he said, handing her a document file they had prepared together in San Francisco and reminding her it must be delivered specifically to Kayashima, the heavyset balding executive three doors down.

When Kate returned to her office, Ryoki faced his work feeling weighed down. The folder he had given Kate contained a headache the curmudgeonly Kayashima would not want to see, and Ryoki had little hope he would accept it willingly, particularly from Kate, the unknown outsider. Herein lay the real cost of bringing Kate to São Paulo. It was her responsibility to deliver the folder. Kayashima would refuse. Ryoki would have to intervene, putting his muscle behind the American and placing himself squarely in the outsider’s camp. Not a good place to be for a Japanese whose English is a little too perfect and who has been assigned abroad for so many years that older Tokyo employees like Kayashima might consider him too Westernized to lead this office. It would all pass too civilly for Kate to even recognize the difficult position she put him in. If only he hadn’t had to face this so soon. Then there was this business of gift giving. He suddenly missed his Japanese assistant who had known intuitively which occasion called for what gift. A brief word from him and she would call in the necessary orders, charging them to his accounts at London shops that catered to the Japanese trade, and understood that gifts must be wrapped with careful attention to the messages encoded in specific choices of paper and ribbon. Kate could not automatically draw from the same matrix, and training her would be one more stone on his pile for who knows how long. She would bring other such cultural inconveniences, little irritations and embarrassments. He had thought of some, but not all, and only last night had he begun to realize the full import of her responsibilities. But he had chosen to absorb that cost from the beginning and now must steel himself to stand it for the duration. Still, here in the moment, it made him tired.

Two hours later Ryoki happened to be leaving the conference room when he saw Kate bowing and holding out the file to Kayashima, who had just returned to the office. Kayashima smiled politely, dipping his bow respectfully even as he waved the documents away, vaguely indicating the folder must be taken to an indeterminate junior, laughing kindly and rattling off a list of secretaries who would ultimately be of no use. Ryoki sighed inwardly. Already she was being cut out of the loop, set apart and anesthetized by that excruciating politeness that so impresses foreign “guests” and makes them slow to recognize the gentle herding that kept them confined to their own sphere, something like house arrest in a palace.

Taking a deep breath, Ryoki took a step forward to lend his support, but stopped when Kate abruptly dropped her politely high-pitched feminine Japanese and switched to her own naturally lower-pitched English, smiling and sweetly claiming she could explain the papers better in her native tongue. Mr. Tanaka himself had mentioned Mr. Kayashima’s fine English, she said, keeping up the blarney until Kayashima swallowed his grudging attitude and led her to his desk where the two disappeared from view. Ryoki blinked twice, hardly able to comprehend what he had just seen. Guest status as a weapon. Brilliant strategy. Though, now that he thought about it, Kate may have used a similar tactic on him, once or twice.

He returned to his office, but before he could sit down, Arima entered needing his signature. Ryoki sat in his chair and opened the folder.

“Why are you leaning to the right like that when you sit down? Did you pull a muscle in your back?” Arima asked. Ryoki looked up, unaware he’d done it.

“This chair doesn’t suit me,” he said.

“It’s the same one you had in London, maybe something happened to it in transit.” Arima loved anything mechanical and got down on his knees to take a look underneath, but Ryoki rolled backwards and forwards to demonstrate the chair’s stability.

“I’ll take care of it myself,” Ryoki said blandly, fixing his eyes on the documents. Once Arima left the room, Ryoki stood and sat, stood and sat, chanting quietly,
“No lean no jerk no lean no jerk.”
By the fifth try he thought he’d mastered it. But halfway through the day his back began to twinge, the precursor to the ache he’d developed the night before. The custom chair didn’t quite seem to fit as it had in London, though he couldn’t understand why. Three hours later his back was hurting in earnest and he swallowed two aspirin as he called Brian Porter, asking to buy the gimpy chair he’d been cursing since January. Brian sounded surprised.

“We actually ordered that chair as a gift for you, but I happened to sit in it yesterday and it threw me straight to the floor. Why didn’t you tell Kate it was broken? We would have replaced it for you.” Ryoki coughed to hide a nasty malediction he’d picked up from a cabbie in Cairo.

Nine days later an aging Japanese-Brazilian maintenance man wheeled the chair in, grinning a toothless smile and spitting tiny droplets as he gumbled a string of unrecognizable words and waved a large black bolt that looked curiously familiar. Ryoki couldn’t understand the man, but realized the bolt looked just like the one that had rattled every time he opened or closed the center drawer of his desk in San Francisco, the one he had assumed to be a stray part of the desk itself. Possibly he was mistaken, many bolts look—um, no, too big a coincidence. Kate entered the room just as Gummy turned the chair over and began screwing the bolt under the seat. Her arrested step and widening eyes told him she recognized the chair—and the bolt. He looked from her to the chair and back, a light blinking on in his head.

“So, in San Francisco, did you by chance keep a tool kit in your desk?”

“You deserved it,” she said.

W
hen Tanaka Inc. absorbed The Melo Group, they inherited a number of factories scattered throughout the lower half of Brazil, all of which needed extensive renovation and expansion, requiring a capital budget large enough to administrate a small country for one year. Unless these factories could produce at fifty percent capacity during the three-year renovation project, Tanaka, Brazil would sink under its own weight, an itchy point that had very nearly scuttled the venture in the discussion phase. With this in mind, the board began debating names to head this crucial renovation project very early in the planning stages, eventually boiling down to two: Izumi Nakamura, a longtime company man, and Jackson Browning, a well-known American consultant. There they deadlocked, the older members insisting they should stick with a solid Japanese man they’d known for twenty years, while the more progressive element argued that Browning had been successfully working these kinds of projects all over the world for twenty-five years, twice in Brazil. “He knows the language and the people. We Japanese need to open up, expand,” they said, distributing black and white reports containing seductive numerical proof that Brown had a magician’s gift for conjuring money from thin air. Still, tradition would very likely have won the day had Nakamura not suffered a near-fatal car accident, rendering him incapable of accepting the responsibility for many months, and leaving the progressives to romance Browning unchallenged.

So it was that Kate and Ryoki found themselves flying down to Porto Alegre to inspect the southernmost cluster of factories and meet with Browning in his own office, strategically located hours from headquarters, where Browning bragged he could keep his fingers deep in his own pie. At first Ryoki had bucked at the inconvenience of opening a satellite office. Browning already spent so much time traveling between factories it seemed unnecessary to provide him with a separate base. But the location of his office had been a serious sticking point in Browning’s contract negotiations, and after tracking his miraculous progress since January, Ryoki had come round to conceding the point. In fact, Browning had exceeded expectations so brilliantly that Ryoki had begun to wonder if, given time, the man might prove himself the genius he claimed to be.

Too bad Kate hated him.

The first time Browning had come striding chest-first through São Paulo headquarters, Ryoki had almost heard the phantom clink of spurs, like a cowboy hero dusted off and handed a Harvard degree, which struck him as odd since the man wore a black three-piece Armani, immaculate wingtips and hailed from Chicago.

At that first meeting Kate had welcomed Browning with an open smile, asked him where he was from, did he know the family of so-and-so that she’d been to school with, and surprisingly he did. As far as Ryoki could tell the meetings wore on amicably, but at some indefinable point the mercury had silently dropped to Antarctica and stuck there, the danger revealing itself during an afternoon break when Browning had begun expounding on the old-fashioned virtues of the American heartland as Kate pulled a crossword puzzle book from her bag and asked if anyone knew a seven-letter word for “donkey.” Just then a young intern entered bearing copies and Kate’s stone face suddenly flashed into a smile so glittery and dazzling the poor boy ran off in alarm, not even slowing when he clipped his head on the door. At the time Ryoki had looked at the date on his watch, having noted a bit of shrapnel generally flew right around the third week of the month, and discounted her frigid politeness for the rest of the day. Though he still couldn’t account for the little sniff and the word “pig” she continued to mutter whenever Browning’s name came up.

On the way to the airport that morning, Ryoki had not been thinking about Browning at all. Kate had been quiet since breakfast, the ominous kind that had him rapidly ticking through any outrage he might have committed in the last twenty-four hours that theoretically could have set her off, finally quitting in despair when he realized the list had no actual end. At the terminal they were loaded onto the plane first and sat in isolated silence as the coach passengers funneled haltingly through the nearly empty first class cabin, juggling too many personal belongings in a narrow aisle and casting quasi-resentful glances at the attractive couple who could afford to sit together in the big seats, but seemed to spend their luxury staring blankly at their laps. By the time their plane was taxiing down the runway, Ryoki had had enough and asked her what was wrong.

“Nothing,” she said with false lightness before turning to face the window. But Ryoki put a finger on her arm and asked again, so she had no polite choice except to face him. “Nothing, really—I don’t know, it’s just—” she broke off.
It’s just
is never good.  Ryoki braced himself.

“Are you upset with me?” he asked humbly, in an effort to minimize the damage.

“Why, what have you done?”

“Nothing, nothing at all,” he said quickly.

“Men must suffer from chronic guilt,” she said. He wanted to tell her that men actually suffered from chronic incomprehension, but this didn’t seem the wisest moment. Kate chewed her lip.

“What do you think of Browning?” she asked.

Off the hook! Off the hook!

“Why, does he have a knife up his pant leg?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said, then added almost under her breath, “Not that he hasn’t offered me the chance.”

Ahh, there was the trouble.  Browning was a bit rough-hewn from clawing his way up from the Chicago projects, even used colorful talk as part of his no-nonsense M.O. Very likely he’d made some unfortunate comment within her hearing. Ryoki tried to think if she’d ever been alone with Browning, but couldn’t think of a single time longer than a few minutes at most. Probably just rough talk, he concluded, a clash of personalities, lady and the tramp.

Ryoki started to reach for the reports he’d stowed in his seat pocket, but pulled his hand away, suddenly feeling a pricking in the gut. What if Kate assumed he would be jealous, a weapon she could use against her perceived enemy? Without pausing to consider whether Kate would honestly employ such a ruse, he became irritated by the very possibility and automatically took up Browning’s defense.

“He’s a manufacturing genius, brilliant reputation. Just ignore his quirks,” Ryoki said, going for soothing, but coming off patronizing. “I’m always standing right there. What can he do?”

“You’re always standing miles away,” she said. Ryoki didn’t follow. He’d never have cause to send her to Porto Alegre alone. “The man’s a player,” she went on. “I did some checking. Did you know he’s been married four times and his current wife chose to stay in New York?”

“Lots of people are unlucky in love, Kate, especially these days,” he said, though truthfully the statistic had given him pause when he read Browning’s company file.

“Having met him, do you really think it’s about luck?” Kate spoke with such distain that Ryoki turned to look at her face, realizing he knew nothing about what had broken up her marriage, how it might have skewed her perception of men.

“Men are good at compartmentalizing. I’m not saying it’s right, but a man can beat his wife and still maintain impeccable professional ethics, happens all the time,” he said gently.

“What kind of swiss cheese ethics only protects the male population? I suspect that man’s blown through some major moral speed bumps, maybe even torn out his undercarriage. What’s to keep him from screwing somebody else should the need arise, like a rich young C.E.O. who didn’t have to struggle the way he did?” Raw patch. Direct hit.

“I
don’t
think he’s interested in hitting on me,” Ryoki said coolly.

Kate let out one of her strangled groans with something that sounded like “deliberately obtuse,” but he couldn’t be sure. “If he ever has a real need, I’ll bet he shows his colors. I’ll bet you a dollar,” she said, looking him directly in the eye. “And you’re right. He is brilliant.”