Mitodarni rings back, apologetically. He has other clients, and he has to cancel. Two o'clock today Wednesday becomes two o'clock Friday. Very inconvenient, since the Merlercians should be here by then. But I cannot delay Chobber indefinitely. Mitodarni takes it upon himself to reschedule our police-lawyer-client meeting.
        After Chobber's cyanide revelation, things smooth out, and I have the sense of having somehow survived a little earthquake in causality. We get through Wednesday without any more alarums and Thursday proves to be a normal routine day. Disaster does not strike until Friday.
        In the darkness before dawn on Friday morning I have a dream. In my dream, a plane crashes. On board is the contingent from South Zeast Commercial Acquisitions. Their leader, the blonde and beautiful Kilsarda Jevonica Klemp, catches fire and burns.
        "I told you to call me Kitty!" she says, as she flounders in the fire. "I told you by phone, I told you by e-mail, I told you face to face!"
        It is my fault that she is burning. A blue jellyfish swims out of the flames to tell me so. The jellyfish shoves itself into my open mouth, and I choke. And wake.
        I go downstairs and switch on the TV, half expecting to see news of an air crash. Instead, I watch a segment about a government initiative to ban the use of face paint at sports venues, a piece about a retired pharmacist who has been arrested for rape on the basis of DNA evidence which is twenty years old, and an item about an alarming rise in the rates of sexually transmitted disease amongst adolescents.
        It seems that my bad dream was exactly that: on the most generous analysis, just a bad dream, not an example of prophetic powers in action.
        The plan was that Kitty and her squad of Merlercian negotiators would fly into Nizon from Merlercia on Oolette Air, arriving Friday morning at 09:10. I phone the National Flight Center and confirm that the flight is on schedule. Then I go back to bed and try to get some more sleep, but fail.
        The plan was that after being processed through immigration and customs at Bakufueki International Airport, Kitty and her squad would catch a connecting flight to Yendo at 11:20. At 11:30 I make another call to the National Flight Center to see if the 11:20 flight has left on time. It hasn't. It has been delayed for twenty minutes because of the late arrival of a connecting flight. When I phone back as the hour approaches twelve noon, I'm told that the plane has taken off.
        Good.
        Everything is going to plan, more or less.
        Or so I think.
        The bad news comes by phone only ten minutes later. It's Kitty on the phone, embarrassed at having to confront me with a major negative.
        This morning, having arrived at the airport earlier than expected thanks to a favorable tailwind, our Merlercians were intercepted by a quarantine team at Bakufueki International Airport. Instead of flying south to Yendo, they are still in Bakufueki, where they have been confined to a hotel near the airport on suspicion of having symptoms of red parrot fever. Their cellphones were confiscated when they were taken into custody -- the official justification for this, it seems, is to limit public panic -- and they have only just been allowed access to ordinary phones.
        "I do apologize," says Kitty. "I don't know when they're going to let us out."
        "Whenever you can get here," I say, struggling not to betray my distress, "we'll be ready to sit down and do business. I entirely understand that this is out of your control."
        To my own ears, this statement sounds reasonable and appropriate. But, even so, on the emotional level this feels like a desperately bad development. Day by day, our financial situation worsens. I cannot know when the final disaster will fall on us. But what I do know is that every day that delays negotiations heightens the danger that an unavoidable crisis will force us into bankruptcy.
        I explain what has happened to Iola. Our rescuers are not coming to the rescue. They've been thrown into quarantine. Locked up. It's a little frightening, really, how severely the government can act when it's motivated to clamp down on your liberty.
        "I don't imagine they're really plague carriers," I say. "I guess it's just another of those false alarms. But we have to expect that they'll be detained, oh, I don't know. Maybe a couple of days. At least."
        "Well," says Iola, "you'd better phone everyone. Everyone's really focused on this, Ken. You should start phoning now."
        I didn't need that piece of advice, but one of the privileges of being a wife is that you are free to give your husband unwanted and unnecessary advice (within limits). I make the necessary phone calls, and I'm barely done when I get a call from Mitodarni.
        "Do you have to cancel two o'clock?" I ask.
        Bad news if he does, since we should have had the meeting on Wednesday, and it is already Friday. If we have to cancel again, Chobber will get the impression that I am being deliberately difficult.
        "No," says Mitodarni. "I just called to ask if you'd heard about Depapaka."
        "Heard?" I ask. "What is there to hear?"
        "He's dead," says Mitodarni. "He's dead, it seems to be suicide, and Inajari Dragonhouse is bankrupt."
        "What!?" I say.
        "Inajari was forced into bankruptcy in a court hearing yesterday," says Mitodarni. "Old man Depapaka was found hanging in his bedroom this morning. He left a letter for his lawyer tasking him to contact certain people, and one of them was you. Hence this phone call."
        That would be Depapaka's style. He was, I have to admit, rather strange, and having his lawyer call my lawyer to have my lawyer call me would be the kind of convoluted arrangement he would be likely to make to send a simple "I'm dead" message, which he could just as easily have sent by e-mail before kicking away the chair, or whatever it was he did to hang himself.
        "Okay," I say, feeling dazed. "Thanks for updating me. I'll have to see about a new bamboo supplier, I suppose."
        And the call is over, and I am left trying to process the shock. I got a phone call from Depapaka recently, didn't I? When was it? It feels as if it was only the other day. Oh ... it was last month. On the day of Aunt Chariot's funeral, if memory serves. I certainly don't recall Depapaka sounding suicidal. Or even upset.
        For the past three hundred years, my family has always acquired bamboo from the same source, Inajari Dragonhouse Liquors, a family company located in Inferior Chimono, a company which has as its primary business the manufacture of rice wine. The notion that they have suddenly gone bankrupt, and that old man Depapaka has committed suicide, is difficult to absorb.
        I find myself feeling guilty at my own reaction, which is largely focused on the financial damage that this represents. In more prosperous times, we (that is, Udamana Holdings) extended quite a large loan to Inajari Dragonhouse Liquors. I later also made a personal loan (ten million zen, a sum which seems substantial under the present circumstances) to Depapaka. Both those loans are probably going to go unpaid.
        "Money," I say.
        I am seeing everything through the lens of money. I hate living like this. But the fact is there: if the Merlercians do not buy us out, then we are facing a financial crunch, and the conversion of two outstanding loans into definite bad debts brings financial disaster significantly closer, both for me personally and for the Udamana clan as a whole.
        "All that I need now," I say, "is a phone call saying our Merlercians have tested positive for red parrot fever."
        Now that really would be the end!