A Celebration at a Fine Restaurant
Evening.
After finishing our paperwork, Grace and I moved to a high-end restaurant in Boston’s Back Bay.
Grill 23 & Bar.
There was a saying that if you wanted to know what the word “success” tasted like in Boston, this was where you had to come.
Since opening in 1983, Grill 23 had been where Wall Street’s winners came to celebrate their deals.
Across the black marble floor, the light from brass table lamps spread in a soft glow, and the wine cellars lined along the walls held vintage bottles worth thousands apiece, arranged without a speck of dust on them.
The crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling sparkled like frozen waterfalls.
Beneath them, gentlemen in black suits and ladies in silk dresses were chatting in low voices.
On one side of the restaurant, a chef could be seen through a glass panel, carving meat by hand.
White marbling settled over the red flesh like frost.
The prime-grade beef, dry-aged for a hundred days, cost well over $120 per plate.
For reference, in 1992 the average monthly food budget for an American family of four was around $400.
For two people to eat dinner here was, in effect, to burn through half a working-class family’s grocery bill for an entire month.
At the entrance, a waiter in a tuxedo greeted us.
His gaze moved back and forth between me and the papers in my hand.
The documents listed the make and plate number of the truck I’d left with the valet.
He hesitated for a moment, looking at the truck I’d arrived in and then at my clothes, but he quickly recovered and put on a professional smile.
“Do you have a reservation?”
“Grace Fairfax. Seven-thirty reservation.”
“Fairfax... Ah!”
Once he checked the reservation list, his attitude changed 180 degrees.
“Ms. Fairfax. I’ll show you to the VIP table by the window. This way, please.”
A window table was the best seat in the restaurant.
Not only could you take in the night view of Back Bay through the floor-to-ceiling glass, but you were also comfortably separated from the other tables, so no one could overhear your conversation.
It was the kind of spot where you didn’t have to worry about other diners heading to the restroom or servers bustling past and disturbing the atmosphere.
As soon as Grace and I sat down, another waiter came over and poured ice water into our glasses.
The glasses were cut from Baccarat crystal, and the towel placed beside them carried the faint scent of lavender.
“Here is our wine list. Please take your time.”
The wine list the waiter handed me had a leather cover stamped with gold lettering.
It was as thick as a novel.
From the very first page, the names of France’s First Growth wineries—Château Lafite, Château Margaux, Château Latour—were lined up in neat columns, and the prices climbed from $200 a bottle all the way to $3,000.
Grace flipped through the list with practiced hands, then gestured to the waiter.
“Two hundred-day dry-aged T-bones. Medium rare. As for the wine... we’ll have the 1982 Château Margaux.”
1982 Château Margaux. $1,200 a bottle.
One bottle of that wine could buy a middle-class family of four in 1992 three months’ worth of food and drink.
But Grace didn’t even look at the price tag.
The girl who used to haggle over the price of a five-dollar hamburger in the student cafeteria was nowhere to be seen; in her place sat a Fairfax, one of the people who would one day stand at the helm of GreenHell Group and had the ambition to make that happen.
The waiter bowed politely and withdrew.
Before long, the sommelier came personally to the table with the wine.
As though performing some sacred ritual, he pulled the cork and poured Grace a taste first.
She swirled the glass, smelled the aroma, took a sip, and swallowed.
“...It’s good. Please pour it.”
The dark red liquid filled the crystal glass, and the sommelier retreated with a respectful step.
The restaurant lights shimmered across the surface of the wine.
I lifted my glass and tipped it lightly toward Grace.
“Good work.”
“You too.”
We clinked glasses.
Ching-!
The sound rang clear.
Grace took a sip of wine and closed her eyes.
“Hah...”
After a slow exhale, she spoke.
“To be honest, when I started this project eight weeks ago... I never thought it would turn out like this.”
“Then what did you think would happen?”
“I couldn’t picture myself succeeding. I’d never really succeeded at anything before. More precisely, not by doing things my own way instead of the way someone else told me to.”
Schoolwork has a set method.
If you follow it well enough, good grades are guaranteed.
But success in the real world has no fixed formula.
There are limits to imitating others, and in the end you need something of your own.
Grace slowly turned her wineglass and stared off into the distance.
“Do you know what people said when I laid out the plan to buy two million lottery tickets? Everyone said I’d lost my mind. That I was an idiot dumping money into a game of chance. Even my father shook his head. No one supported me.”
“What did your father say?”
“...He said, ‘It’s the money you’ve earned, so do what you want with it. But if you fail, there won’t be another chance.’ That’s what he said. I don’t think it was cruel. My father grew up under my grandfather the same way, and he climbed over his brothers just the same. The Fairfax family is a place that speaks through results. That’s the kind of Fairfax I want to be.”
A bitter smile touched Grace’s voice.
“Honestly, when we hit the eighty percent mark, I was ready to give up. The remaining twenty percent was scattered through the Berkshire hills and the northern borderlands, and there was no way my people could get to it. The temps kept complaining, the costs ballooned like crazy...”
She looked straight at me.
“Then you showed up, carrying those full lottery boxes.”
“...”
“You’re like a wizard. And no, I’m not saying that just because you’re Asian. I mean it. That volume I couldn’t gather with all my effort for weeks—you brought it in, in just twenty-four hours... I still can’t believe it.”
I shrugged.
In truth, I hadn’t gathered the remaining tickets in twenty-four hours. I’d been preparing for it ever since I heard she was launching the lottery project.
Before I regressed, Grace’s project had failed at around the ninety percent mark and collapsed in defeat.
Of course, she had avenged that failure the following year, but because of that setback she’d had to spend nearly all her time focused on her next business plan, unable to enjoy most of what Harvard could offer her.
So in this life, I wanted to keep her from suffering that failure at all.
...Though, of course, pure good intentions weren’t the whole story.
Success in this project would also benefit me, since I could ride on Grace’s network and credit assets.
Grace held out her wineglass.
“Thank you, Sanha. Without you, this project would have gone up in smoke.”
Her expression turned serious as she continued.
“We got the HAA membership, secured the entry slot for the Oddball Entrepreneur Competition, and even opened the Platinum-tier credit line. I placed the lottery winnings with the HAA, but we can still borrow up to about four million dollars at low interest, so we’ve got bullets we can use whenever we need them.”
“Right. At Prime Plus 1.5%, that’s around ten percent a year by current standards. Compared to ordinary credit loans at fifteen to eighteen percent, it’s an outrageous deal.”
“You really are easy to talk to. It’s like a weight’s been lifted off my chest. When I’m facing you like this, I feel like... I can think about the future.”
“The future?”
“Ah, no! I mean—business future! That we could plan our next venture together! Whenever I come up with a business plan, everyone just laughs or worries and tries to stop me. But you actually listen to me seriously. Even if it’s something as ridiculous as a lottery scheme.”
Grace hurried to explain, flustered, and waved her hand in embarrassment.
At that moment, a waiter approached with a huge plate.
“Your hundred-day dry-aged T-bone steak.”
The meat on the plate was as big as a forearm.
A T-shaped bone ran through the center, with tender filet on one side and juicy sirloin on the other.
The moment my knife cut in, red juice seeped out, and one bite flooded my mouth with rich, savory flavor.
“...This is delicious.”
Grace murmured in awe with her eyes closed.
“So this is why people want to succeed. Once you know what this tastes like, you can never go back to the school cafeteria.”
“The hamburgers at school are good in their own way.”
“They are. But if you have the choice?”
She smiled and speared another piece of meat with her fork.
I cut into my own steak as well.
It felt as though the exhaustion from the last few battle-like days was being washed away by top-grade protein and alcohol.
Partway through the meal, Grace suddenly spoke.
“...Hey, Sanha.”
“Yeah?”
“What kind of woman do you like?”
Grace asked it as casually as if she were discussing the weather.
Before I could answer, she went on.
“You like tall, thin types, right? Someone like Caroline.”
“Caroline? Caroline Channing?”
Caroline was a classmate who worked as a student assistant in Harvard’s University Hall.
I’d taken physical education with her, and at the year-end...
“Yeah. The Caroline Channing you went to the end-of-semester dance with.”
“...”
The end-of-semester dance was one of the major events for Harvard freshmen, so I’d gone to make connections.
For reference, Grace had skipped it because she was too busy with the lottery buyout project at the time.
Grace continued.
“Caroline is pretty. Shiny blond hair, sapphire-blue eyes, and a body like a supermodel. From what I’ve heard, she even does modeling for the Harvard magazine.”
“Really? I never thought she was all that pretty.”
“You went to the dance with her because you thought she was pretty, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t want to make an enemy by refusing outright. Besides, I was planning to go to the dance anyway. And you were too busy with the lottery project back then, so I never even brought it up.”
“...”
At my answer, Grace stopped cutting her steak for a moment.
“So what you’re saying is that if I hadn’t been busy, you would’ve gone with me?”
“Probably. You’re the only woman I’m close with.”
“...”
Grace pinned her steak with the knife and began sawing at it with her fork, creaking back and forth.
“Ahem. Well, fine. But I do think Caroline’s a decent girl. Pretty face, good body. Pretty face. Good body. Those two strengths are huge. Even if those were the only things she had going for her, that would still be a lot. Of course, it would be even better if intelligence matched the looks. Ah, I’m not saying Caroline lacks intelligence. She’s a Harvard student, after all. I mean relative to, well, relative. Relative to someone who has a pretty face, a good body, and intelligence too.”
“?”
I was too busy eating to catch all of what she was saying.
But I couldn’t exactly leave her hanging, so I asked, just to keep the mood going, “Then what kind of man do you like?”
“Me? Uh... w-why are you asking all of a sudden?”
“You asked me.”
“Well. Right. Hmm.”
Grace suddenly thought hard about something, then opened her mouth.
“I guess... I like someone with a bit of a mysterious feel.”
“Mysterious?”
“Yeah. Too obvious is boring, isn’t it? People with rigid thinking, people who’ve lived only by following what others told them to do, people whose future is so obvious you can see it from a mile away—I don’t really like that.”
“So you like unpredictable variables?”
“Not exactly. I definitely hate someone who’s completely impossible to control, like some reckless lunatic. What I mean is someone who doesn’t reject common sense or public consensus, but still has originality and a mind of their own within that framework. For example, someone who has a perfectly ordinary desire, like wanting to make money, but tries to achieve it through a method or idea that’s wildly unusual...”
Grace added, almost as an afterthought, “...and preferably not white or black.”
“So, an Asian guy?”
“Huh? Ah, no. It’s not like there are only three races in the whole world.”
“Fair enough. The theory that divided humanity into Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid has been discarded anyway.”
“...I wasn’t trying to go that far into the weeds.”
We clinked our wineglasses again.
Grace seemed a little unsettled, perhaps dissatisfied with the exchange, but I didn’t pay much attention.
The important joint project was finished successfully, and from here on out, what remained was my private business.
Grace changed the subject.
“So. What’s your plan going forward?”
“My plan?”
“Yeah. The HAA credit line is open, and you’ve got your entry into the Oddball Entrepreneur Competition locked in. From where I’m sitting, winning shouldn’t be a problem. So what’s your next step? A private venture?”
“...”
I looked out the window.
Boston’s nightscape spread beyond the glass.
It looked dazzling, but in truth it was the winter of early 1992, and it was cooling into something hard and cold.
The real estate bubble had burst. Companies were collapsing one after another. Banks had shut their wallets.
The streets were overflowing with the unemployed, and the news blared about the recession day after day.
But to my eyes, it looked different.
“That’s right. A private venture.”
In a recession like this, cash was king.
If you had cash, you could scoop up anything at bargain-basement prices—ridiculously discounted prices.
It was an absurd situation, really: solid companies were running out of cash and going under on paper despite being profitable.
And the best properties were coming out in auction markets at less than half of half their original cost, weren’t they?
For an entrepreneur, a recession like this was, in fact, an opportunity.
“When everyone else is screaming that they’re going to die and shutting their businesses down, that’s exactly when you open one.”
“...”
At my words, Grace slowly nodded.
“A perfectly ordinary desire, but the method or idea to achieve it is wildly unusual... yes...”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing! Go on.”
Grace’s eyes gleamed.
She was, after all, someone with finance in her blood.
She could probably smell opportunity as instinctively as I could.
I continued, “The banks have tightened lending so much that the whole world’s caught in a credit crunch. When cash flow dries up like this, you can buy assets people would never even dream of touching at dirt-cheap prices. As long as you have cash. And we can borrow up to four million dollars through the HAA line. Add in the personal assets we’ve already accumulated, and...”
I smiled faintly.
“...we can pull out an enormous amount of leverage.”
Grace put down her fork and leaned forward.
“What exactly are you aiming for?”
“Distressed debt, factories on the verge of bankruptcy, office buildings on the block... anything. The market is saturated with fear right now, so everyone’s dumping things for pennies. But recessions don’t last forever. If we just hold out for two or three years, the economy will recover, and the value of the assets we buy now will multiply several times over.”
“...Classic contrarian investing. Buy when others are selling, sell when others are buying. It’s a strategy Warren Buffett loves.”
“Not just Buffett. Every great fortune in history was built on asset accumulation during downturns. J.P. Morgan during the Great Depression in 1929, the Rockefeller family during the 1973 oil shock, George Soros during Black Monday in 1987. They all made bold bets when everyone else was panicking and running. And so did GreenHell, someday.”
“But we can’t just buy anything, can we? We’d need to pick companies with solid fundamentals that are only struggling because cash has temporarily dried up. We’ll need an eye for distinguishing the true from the false. Is there any sector you usually keep an eye on?”
“There is.”
“What is it?”
For the first time, I shared part of my plan with Grace.
“Oil fields and gold mines.”
Companies that could dig money straight out of the ground.
Lean little powerhouses whose stock prices would take off all on their own, by hundreds or even thousands of times once the recession passed.
I intended to buy them all up.