Chapter 7: What He Sells

His office was on the fifty-first floor, and it had no pictures on the walls.

Just a desk the size of a door, two chairs, and the whole lit-up city behind the glass.

It was past eight.

The floor was empty.

"Ask," Leon said.

I sat down in one of the chairs and kept my coat on.

"What do you sell?"

"Air defense systems. Artillery parts. Radar. To governments, through approved channels, with paperwork a foot thick."

"To who?"

"Fourteen countries. Seven of them you'd call allies."

"And the other seven?"

"I'd call them customers."

He didn't smile.

"Has anything you sold killed a child?" I said.

It was the kind of question I'd have asked a man in a bar, to make him leave.

He didn't leave.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Yes," he said.

The room got very quiet.

"Twice that I know of. A buyer resold a shipment to men I'd never have sold to. I found out eight months later."

"What did you do?"

"I cut the buyer. All of it. Three hundred million a year, gone."

"Why?"

"Because he lied to me."

"That's it?"

"That's the only rule I have," Leon said. "I don't sell to a man who lies to me."

"And your uncle?"

"Reginald wants the old customers back. Private buyers. Men with no flags."

His eyes didn't move off mine.

"My father sold to anybody who paid. I stopped it the week he died."

"Reginald has wanted it back ever since."

"So that's what the vote is really about."

"Yes."

"If you lose, he sells to anybody."

"Yes."

I thought about my shop, about the glass wands and the lavender rabbits.

I thought about how small my trade was, next to his.

I thought, strangely, that mine hurt fewer people.

"I'll stay," I said.

"You haven't asked everything."

"I have one condition."

"Name it."

"You don't lie to me. Not once. If you won't answer, you say, I won't answer. But you never give me a false one."

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