A week earlier, almost immediately after his conversation with Pia, Berman flew in his Gulfstream to Milan, where he had met up with yet more Chinese dignitaries. At least he wasn’t meeting any new people: this delegation was made up of individuals he had encountered over the last two years in Boulder or in China, and Whitney Jones had coached him for hours on their names and personal interests and government jobs. Such information made it far easier to converse with these people and avoid the painful stretches of silence he’d endured in his early encounters with them. Raising capital wasn’t his favorite job, particularly with the Chinese, because their bureaucratic mind-set was contrary to his value system. In fact, he freely admitted he hated dealing with them, save for the rare few who had an entrepreneurial streak, however suppressed. Yet on the world stage the big money was in China. That was the long and short of it.

One man Berman now saw regularly and who was easier to deal with than most of the others was Yan, who insisted on being called Jimmy. Jimmy spoke excellent English and was apparently a man of some status in the bewilderingly complex government hierarchy. Jimmy was actually good company, Berman had been happy to find, and it was really to meet him that Berman had come to Milan. Jimmy was a cosmopolitan man who had studied for a time at Stanford, so he was able to converse with Berman about American matters in American English. He wore a Western-style suit and sported a better haircut than the other officials Berman had met. How old he was, Berman didn’t know, although he suspected Jimmy was younger than he, and in good physical shape, as compared with the other Chinese bureaucrats Berman had to spend time with.

Berman knew Jimmy was very smart. Politics was a particular area of interest, and he quizzed Berman closely about recent American presidential elections. He seemed amused by the process. How did Americans know if the people they supported would make good leaders? he wondered. To Jimmy it all seemed absurdly random, more of a popularity contest. Berman’s response was that was the way democracy worked. “The people pick the person they think will make the best leader,” Berman said. “The people?” Jimmy asked enigmatically, and left it at that.

Berman knew the drill with the Chinese, and he was calm and confident when he spoke to them as a group. He’d picked up a few words of Mandarin, and it always amused his guests when he tried a new phrase, even if he almost always mangled it.