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Chapter 1 The Contract
Chapter 1 The Contract
The wind in Linpu came off the river. At the end of March it was still damp. Jiang Ruoxue drove into the garage under Yanbei Properties while the radio was talking about the water level. She cut the sound and sat in the driver's seat for a dozen seconds, looking at the black folder on the passenger side. There was no company mark on the cover. Only four characters she had written herself, in pencil: Nanpu Parcel.
Eighty-six mu. Old warehouses along the river, seven brick buildings, a steel shed thrown up later, twenty-two tenants, lease endings scattered all over the calendar. Jiangcheng Group wanted the land. The reason could be laid out whole in a boardroom: if the line in the south of the city slipped another quarter, the development loan, already extended twice, would be taken back by the bank and put on the table again, and that table would not be any kinder than the one in front of her. Her father had said the same thing at home, straighter, straight as a curse. Jiang Ruoxue did not curse. She turned the cursing into a scope of authority, a rhythm of payment, and a line she would not cross, put it in the folder, and drove.
In the elevator mirror she saw herself. Thirty-four. Black hair cut to the collarbone, not carefully curled this morning, only tucked behind her ears. A dark gray suit. The collar of the white shirt buttoned to the second button. One higher and it would look as if she were trying to please someone. The wedding ring was a thin platinum band, worn six years, the edge already a little smoothed by ordinary days. Before he put it on her, Lin Hao had said a ring should not steal attention from the hand. He had meant it. He was in Hexi now, at the camp of a joint archaeological team, the signal there and then gone. Four days ago he had called. The wind was too loud. She caught only "pottery rim" and "have you eaten." She said she had. That supper had been printed clauses and a cup of tea gone cold.
Seventeenth floor. The meeting-room door stood open. Her lawyer had gone in first: Zhou Heng, forty-two, slow in speech, a man who hated adjectives in a meeting. Finance followed, Ma Chi, the calculation sheets clamped under his arm, the chain on his glasses swinging. The other side was already seated. The head of the table was empty, a piece of staged modesty. The person who would actually speak sat to the right of it.
Lu Chen. She had read the brief. Thirty-six. Authorized negotiator for Yanbei Properties. Not the shareholder with the largest stake, but the signature on every outward paper for the last half year. The photograph was a bad one, the identity-card kind. You could not tell his height. You could tell he did not smile. In person he was quieter than the photograph. A charcoal suit, no tie. On his wrist a leather strap gone old, the leather fuzzed near the buckle hole. He stood and offered his hand. The palm was dry. The pressure was exact. He did not keep the hand half a second too long.
"Director Jiang."
"Mr. Lu."
Han Yu sat farther in. Around sixty, eyebrows thick, a man who treated efficiency as a moral good. Beside him was Lawyer Pei, lenses very thin, notebook already open to a blank page. The courtesies were short to the point of rudeness. Han Yu said they had waited three years inside the company for the Nanpu parcel and did not intend to wait another three months. Jiang Ruoxue opened the folder and did not pick up the feeling in the sentence.
"We go by the page," she said. "The red line on the first page does not match the drawing the planning bureau attached last November. The extra four-tenths of a mu at the northeast corner. Did you count the flood channel in?"
Lu Chen looked at her. The look was not a man being needled. It was a thing set down where it belonged.
"Yes," he said. "The flood channel is not in the transfer price. We correct the red line today. A drafting error. Not a pricing tactic."
Han Yu's finger struck the table once. Jiang Ruoxue did not wear the face of someone who had scored a point. She only drew a pencil line through that row and wrote beside it: red line to follow the planning drawing. The tail of the pencil carried a faint tooth mark, an old habit from revising papers. She turned the pencil so the mark faced herself.
The price sat on the fourth page. One billion seven hundred twenty million yuan. Fifty percent on signing. Delivery in one hundred and twenty days. The penalties for delay were written out of balance. If the buyer paid late, five ten-thousandths a day. If the seller delivered late, the count did not start until thirty days had passed, and a wide exception had been cut for "existing leases not attributable to the seller." Under that, another line: a joint and several guarantee from the buyer's actual controller.
She laid the page flat. Her voice was still a working voice.
"One point seven two billion sits outside the range the board gave me. I will not name the range today. I don't intend to hand you a new opening bid. We will not sign a joint and several personal guarantee. Jiangcheng can talk about support through the project company's equity, the order of future mortgages, and supervised accounts. We will not put my father's entire personal estate behind a warehouse site that is not yet clear land."
"Why isn't Director Jiang's father here today?" Han Yu asked.
"Because he authorized me to come," she said. "The letter of authority is attachment three of the document in front of you. If the attachment is not enough, I can add to it. Adding paper does not change the scope."
The room was quiet for a few seconds. Lu Chen took no one's tone. He turned to the tenant list and pushed a thicker set of pages across. The edge of the paper still had the fresh burr of the binding holes.
"The summary is for people who don't want dirty hands," he said. "This is the ground. Of the twenty-two, four have no written contract. They were carried on years ago by word of mouth from the warehouse clerks. One of them, Cai Shufen, has lived behind Warehouse Three for twenty-nine years. There is a camphor behind the house. The roots have already pushed into the drain. All of that touches clearance. So one hundred and twenty days is not a slogan. If we split out the oral tenancies and the special residence, the delivery default can be written to match. If Director Jiang only wants to press the price, we can spend a day performing. If Director Jiang wants a parcel that can break ground next year, these things go on the table today."
Ma Chi bent over the pages. The line between his brows slowly tightened. Zhou Heng looked at Jiang Ruoxue and waited for her to decide what temper the negotiation would have.
She nodded. "On the table. Start with the oral tenancies. Cai Shufen's power, her water, whether she has a household registration or a residence record. I want them before this afternoon. No record, and she cannot be counted as an ordinary trading tenant, and she is not to be used to put delivery off without a limit."
They talked for two hours. The tea was changed twice. The second time she did not drink. Lu Chen did not speak much. Every sentence came with a page number. When she calculated too fast he turned the calculator around, not to correct her in front of the room, but to put the working in the middle of the table so everyone could see which figure was wrong. Once the late amount she called was a hundred and ten thousand off the sheet. He owned it first. Their formula had written February as twenty-eight days and had not been changed for the leap year. Han Yu lost patience, went out to take a call, and came back with a larger temper, as if the voice on the other end had promised him some quicker win. Lawyer Pei looked less and less at his own client and wrote, more and more, in the margins, sentences that could actually be carried out.
Near noon Jiang Ruoxue put the pencil down.
"We stop the morning here. The personal guarantee comes out of the draft, or we do not sit this afternoon. On price we are not yet inside a range that can be talked. The flood-channel red line is redrawn today. The oral tenants need photographs of the present state and the actual power records. Also: there was a wharf along the Nanpu riverfront, and older house foundations before that. I want a clause in the contract for cultural relics and for unknown structures underground. Not romance. Schedule. If we actually dig something up, the stoppage should not count as our breach."
Han Yu let out a laugh. "Director Jiang's husband works in archaeology. The clause sounds like a benefit for the family."
The air at the edge of the table changed. Zhou Heng's pen stopped. Jiang Ruoxue looked at Han Yu. The look was level, level to the point of cold.
"Whether my husband is in Hexi or not does not change what may be under this land," she said. "Half the old warehouses in Linpu sit on filled mudflat. The other half sit on older courtyards. Page thirty-two of your own ground-investigation summary records anomalous reflections. Do not pretend you failed to see them. A relics clause is a division of risk, not housework. If Yanbei thinks housework can be used as talk at a table, then the level of this meeting is not equal."
Han Yu's laugh closed. Lu Chen did not look at Han Yu. He looked at her. His voice was not high.
"The relics clause goes into the draft this afternoon. I'll bring the original of the page with the anomalous reflections. The personal guarantee is deleted. Half past one."
People moved out. Her pencil rolled to the lip of the table again, as if it meant to leave something. Lu Chen picked it up and handed it back. The tooth mark on the barrel faced his thumb. He saw it. He did not smile, and he did not turn that small privacy into a joke. She took the pencil and put it in the folder.
The corridor window faced the river. A ship's horn was so far off it seemed to come from another year. He stood half a step behind her and to the side. The distance was well kept.
"Director Jiang does not look long at people," he said. "Most of the time you look at figures."
"Figures don't get embarrassed for me."
"They won't cut a price for me either."
She turned her face. His eyes were a deep brown, near black when the light was poor. On a face of thirty-six there were no lines set there to please, only a little blue left by nights without sleep, and the clean line of the jaw. He looked at her and said the next sentence very clearly. Clearly enough that if an intern had been standing by, the intern could not have mistaken it for manners. For the moment, luckily, the corridor held no one else.
"This afternoon I go on with the contract. Outside the contract there is one sentence I want finished before noon, so you don't think I am using the two things mixed. I want you. It is not a condition for a concession. It is not the kind of smoothing that lives in Mr. Han's head. If you refuse, the price stays what the price should be. I will not drop a single clause that ought to be fought. If you want this subject ended now, we end it here. This afternoon there is only the red line and the penalties."
The elevator opened. Two people stood inside with boxed lunches. Jiang Ruoxue looked at Lu Chen. Her heart struck the inside of the shirt. Her face cooled first. Coolness was her gift, and sometimes the method she used to put a true thing off.
"Mr. Lu," she said. "Half past one. Please take the personal-guarantee clause physically out of the file. Do not fob it off with a strike-through. Write the relics clause as sentences that can be performed. Not as a wish."
She stepped into the elevator. Before the doors met she saw him nod once. Like a man accepting a clause. Also like a man accepting that another, more private thing had no answer yet.
In the mirror her collar was still buttoned to the second button. The ring was cool on the finger. She opened the hand that had held the pencil, and closed it.
He wanted her.
He had said it like a man laying down what he held, not like an attack. That made refusal harder, and made it something that had to be taken seriously. Between the seventeenth floor and basement two she took the sentence apart three times. No threat. No trade. No touch. No hint that she was cheaper because her husband was away. Only a grown man, on the morning of the first day of a negotiation, putting desire in the open, and then stepping back into the clauses himself.
The elevator arrived. The garage air was still damp, mixed with tire and concrete. She did not call Lin Hao. Not because the guilt had failed to grow. Because the wind was probably still up on his end, and on hers even the heat that had moved in her when she heard the sentence could not yet be said to anyone in a whole sentence.
She sat in the car and did not start it at once. The folder lay on her knees. The one point seven two billion on the fourth page sat there like a stone put down in the wrong place. In the blank she wrote, in pencil, the range that was actually hers, and when she had written it she covered it with her palm. Under one and a half billion would be handsome. One billion five hundred sixty million could be signed. Above that number she would rather not do the deal. Personal guarantee: zero. A stoppage for relics: required. The camphor and the person who had lived there twenty-nine years were not decoration on a price. They were the condition of whether the ground could be cleared clean.
She took her hand off the writing and looked at the lines. The hand was steady. Only the last stroke. The three words, I want you, had not been written. The pencil had only stopped on the paper and left a dot almost impossible to see.
