Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Still, he levers himself up on a big, gnarled cane and shakes their hands firmly. His son Furudenendu proffers a hand to help him to his feet and he shrugs it off with glare of mock outrage—this transaction looks pretty well-practiced. There's a brief exchange of small talk that goes right over Randy's head. Then the two minions peel off, like a fighter escort no longer needed, and the maître d' leads Randy, Avi, and Goto père et fils across a totally empty restaurant—twenty or thirty tables set with white linen and crystal—to a corner table, where waiters stand at attention to pull their chairs back. This building is of the sheer-walls-of-solid-glass school of architecture and so the windows go floor-to-ceiling, providing, through a bead curtain of raindrops, a view of nighttime Tokyo that stretches over the horizon. Menus are handed out, printed in French only. Randy and Avi get the girl menus, with no prices. Goto Dengo gets the wine list, and pores over it for a good ten minutes before grudgingly selecting a white from California and a red from Burgundy. Meanwhile, Furudenendu is leading them in exceedingly pleasant small talk about the Crypt.

Randy can't stop looking at Tokyo on the one hand and the empty restaurant on the other. It's like this setting was picked specifically to remind them that the Nipponese economy has been on the skids for the last several years—a situation that the Asian currency crisis has only worsened. He half expects to see executives dropping past the window.

Avi ventures to ask about various tunnels and other stupefyingly vast engineering projects that he happens to have noticed around Tokyo and whether Goto Engineering had anything to do with them. This at least gets the patriarch to glance up momentarily from his wine list, but the son handles the inquiries, allowing as how, yes, their company did play a small part in those endeavors. Randy figures that it's not the easiest thing in the world to engage a personal friend of the late General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in polite chitchat; it's not like you can ask him if he caught the latest episode of Star Trek: More Time-Space Anomalies. All they can really do is cling to Furudenendu and let him take the lead. Goto Dengo clears his throat like the engine of a major piece of earth-moving equipment rumbling to life, and recommends the Kobe beef. The sommelier comes around with the wines and Goto Dengo interrogates him in a mixture of Nipponese and French for a while, until a film of sweat has broken out on the sommelier's brow. He samples the wines very carefully. The tension is explosive as he swirls them around in his mouth, staring off into the distance. The sommelier seems genuinely startled, not to mention relieved, when he accepts both of them. The subtext here would seem to be that hosting a really first-class dinner is a not insignificant management challenge, and that Goto Dengo should not be bothered with social chatter while he is coping with these responsibilities.

At this point Randy's paranoia finally kicks in: is it possible that Goto-sama bought the whole restaurant out for the evening, just to get a little privacy? Were the two minions just aides with unusually bulky briefcases, or were they security, sweeping the place for surveillance devices? Again, subtext-wise, the message seems to be that Randy and Avi are not to worry their pretty, young little heads about these things. Goto Dengo is seated underneath a can light in the ceiling. His hair stands perpendicularly out from his head, a bristling stand of normal vectors, radiating halogenically. He has a formidable number of scars on his face and his hands, and Randy suddenly realizes that he must have been in the war. Which should've been perfectly obvious considering his age.

Goto Dengo inquires about how Randy and Avi got into their current lines of work, and how they formed their partnership. This is a reasonable question, but it forces them to explain the entire concept of fantasy role-playing games. If Randy had known this would happen, he would have thrown himself bodily through a window instead of taking a seat. But Goto Dengo takes it pretty calmly and instantly cross-correlates it to late-breaking developments in the Nipponese game industry, which has been doing this gradual paradigm shift from arcade to role-playing games with actual narratives; by the time he's finished he makes them feel not like lightweight nerds but like visionary geniuses who were ten years ahead of their time. This more or less obligates Avi (who is taking conversational point) to ask Goto Dengo how he got into his line of work. Both of the Gotos try to laugh it off, as if how could a couple of young American visionary Dungeons and Dragons pioneers possibly be interested in something as trivial as how Goto Dengo singlehandedly rebuilt postwar Nippon, but after Avi displays a bit of persistence, the patriarch finally shrugs and says something about how his pop was in the mining racket and so he's always had a certain knack for digging holes in the ground. His English started out minimal and is getting better and better as the evening proceeds, as if he is slowly dusting off substantial banks of memory and processing power, nursing them on-line like tube amplifiers.

Dinner arrives; and so everyone has to eat for a bit, and to thank Goto-sama for his excellent recommendation. Avi gets a bit reckless and asks the old man if he might regale them with some reminiscences about Douglas MacArthur. He grins, as if some secret has been ferreted out of him, and says, “I met the General in the Philippines.” Just like that, he's jujitsued the topic of conversation around to what everyone actually wants to talk about. Randy's pulse and respiration ratchet up by a good twenty-five percent and all of his senses become more acute, almost as if his ears have popped again, and he loses his appetite. Everyone else seems to be sitting up a bit straighter too, shifting in their chairs slightly. “Did you spend much time in that country?” Avi asks.

“Oh, yes. Much time. A hundred years,” says Goto Dengo, with a rather frosty grin. He pauses, giving everyone a chance to get good and uneasy, and then continues, “My son tells me that you want to dig a grave there.”

“A hole,” Randy ventures, after much uncomfortableness.

“Excuse me. My English is rusty,” says Goto Dengo, none too convincingly.

Avi says, “What we have in mind would be a major excavation by our standards. But probably not by yours.”

Goto Dengo chuckles. “That all depends on the circumstances. Permits. Transportation issues. The Crypt was a big excavation, but it was easy, because the sultan was supporting it.”

“I must emphasize that the work we are considering is still in a very early planning phase,” Avi says. “I regret to say I can't give you good information about the logistical issues.”

Goto Dengo comes this close to rolling his eyes. “I understand,” he says with a dismissive wave of the hand. “We will not talk about these things this evening.”

This produces a really awkward pause, while Randy and Avi ask themselves what the hell are we going to talk about then? “Very well,” Avi says, sort of weakly lobbing the ball back in Goto Dengo's general direction.

Furudenendo steps in. “There are many people who dig holes in the Philippines,” he explains with a big knowing wink.

“Ah!” Randy says. “I have met some of the people you are talking about!” This produces a general outburst of laughter around the table, which is none the less sincere for being tense.

“You understand, then,” says Furudenendo, “that we would have to study a joint venture very carefully.” Even Randy easily translates this to: we will participate in your loony-tunes treasure hunt when hell freezes over.