He had requested it. A brief note through Claire, direct and without ceremony, asking if she had time. She had said yes and given the same building. And this time she had let Harold be present because the first meeting had been for truth, and this one was for record. Takahashi arrived the same way he had the first time, alone, quietly dressed.
He acknowledged Harold with a nod, the nod of a man who recognized a counterpart and was prepared to deal with him as one. They sat. The tone was different from the first meeting. The first had been excavation, digging down through the layers of what had been performed and decided and denied until they hit something real. This one was construction, measured, careful, realistic.
Harold led most of it with the precise, unhurried quality of a man who had done this before and knew where the load-bearing points were. Takahashi engaged seriously, not defensively, not with the particular corporate deflection that Amara had expected to see at least some of. He pushed back in two places where he had genuine objections, and both objections were legitimate, and they were worked through. Amara spoke less than she had at the first meeting. This was intentional.
She had said what she needed to say to Takahashi directly, person to person, in the West Loop building 3 weeks ago. What was happening now was the institutional expression of that, and it needed to be built between the institutions involved, not carried personally. Near the end of the meeting, there was a pause in the conversation, and Takahashi looked at her. "I want to tell you something," he said. "Not for the record."
Harold glanced at her. She gave him a small nod. "Go ahead." Takahashi said. "When you answered me in Japanese in the restaurant, my first thought was not embarrassment.
My first thought was recognition." He paused. "I heard him in how you constructed the sentence. The particular verb form, the pacing." He looked at her steadily.
"I knew before I asked you, I already knew who had taught you." Amara held his gaze. "Why did you ask then?" She said. "Because I wanted to hear you say it."
He paused. "And because I wanted to know if you would." She thought about that for a moment. "What did it tell you that I said it the way I did?" "That you were proud of where you came from," he said.
"That you weren't going to pretend otherwise, even in a room where pretending might have been the safer choice." He paused. "Daisuke always said that the way someone spoke about their teachers told you everything about their character." The room was very quiet. Amara looked at this man, 55 years old, powerful in ways that most people never became, capable of the particular cruelty that came from treating people as instruments, and capable, apparently, aren't also of this, sitting in a room and saying a true thing about someone they both knew and respected, without positioning it, without making it serve some other purpose.