Fatal Reaction

reason, author after author counseled against making any changes on the negotiating team once discussions had begun. Great.
    I was also depressed to learn that, if anything, Stephen had underestimated the importance of the physical arrangements for Takisawa’s visit. Not only were esthetic minutiae in business transactions seen as tremendously important by the Japanese, but the entire Japanese concept of hospitality differed wildly from our own. By Japanese standards a good host tries to anticipate and fulfill every need of his or her guest. To that end, it was best if everything were arranged ahead of time down to the smallest detail.
    The more I read the more my stomach hurt. Just the accommodations, transportation, meals, and scheduling would take a tremendous amount of time and effort to organize. Time that I, still unfamiliar with all but the most general terms of the proposed deal with Takisawa, did not have.
    It was the small hours of the morning when I finally walked through the darkened corridor back to my office and pulled the Takisawa file out of my briefcase. It was late, but I was too frightened to be tired. I had promised Stephen that I would take Danny’s role out of loyalty to him and to a company on whose board I served. Now I learned that my presence, even my gender, taken alone, might be enough to derail the negotiation. And I would be dealing with a culture so profoundly different from my own that I could only guess at what hidden pitfalls lay before me.
    In my reading about the Japanese I had come across the same adage over and over again: The nail that stands up gets pounded down. The Japanese use it to illustrate their emphasis on group harmony and consensus building. But sitting alone in my office with the rest of the world asleep, with Danny dead and Stephen’s hold on Azor on the line, I found myself interpreting it as a warning.
     

CHAPTER 11
     
    I drove home in the dangerous single digits of the morning when the streets belong to somebody else. Shooting south toward Hyde Park on the empty ribbon of Lake Shore Drive, I saw parked cars clustered in the swath of green that buffers the lake. Inside people were getting high, getting laid, and committing crimes in the soft glow of the dashboard light. Suddenly I felt old and impossibly cut off from the rest of the world.
    Danny Wohl was dead and I had spent the last seventy-two hours swept up by events that were beyond my control. I had seen the blood-splattered walls of Danny’s once elegant apartment, the stick figure of his body in a homicide cop’s notebook, and his blood-drained corpse on the metal gurney of the funeral home morgue. What made it worse was the fact that from the very first I was so consumed by the problems of taking Danny’s place that there was no time to feel much of anything about his death. Now, suddenly, it was all catching up to me.
    When I got home I was glad to see from the diminutive sneakers lying in the entrance hall that my roommate. Claudia, was home. I hadn’t worn shoes that small since grade school, but Claudia was so tiny that she sometimes had to stand on a stool when assisting a tall surgeon. I poured myself a drink and sat down on the couch to take my shoes off.
    I woke up four hours later to the sound of the front door buzzer. As I struggled to my feet I noticed that the room was just beginning to fill with light and that one of my arms was numb from being wedged between the cushions of the couch.
    Shaking my arm in the hopes of restoring circulation I pushed the intercom and demanded, “Who is it?” in the hostile tone employed, under the same circumstances, by every woman living in the city.
    “It’s Elliott Abelman.”
    As I pushed the button to let him in I realized that I must look like hell. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do anything about it.
    “I’m sorry if I woke you,” he apologized as I met him at the door. He had a steaming container of Starbucks coffee in each hand.
    “You are forgiven,” I replied, accepting one gratefully and ushering him into the apartment.
    “I was just about to head over to Wohl’s apartment,” he explained, “and I was kind of hoping you’d come with toe.” If Elliott was casting about for ways for us to be alone together he’d certainly stumbled onto an interesting choice. Even assuming a lack of ulterior motives, it seemed like something worth avoiding. As if reading toy thoughts, he continued. “It would really help to have