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The food here was notoriously bad, but there were a lot of people anyway, and that suited him fine. It was better to have a lot of people and bad food than to have to read the newspaper out of boredom. The waitress came over and said a few things that he didn't understand, so he waved vaguely at her, which seemed to do the trick. She wrote a few things down on her pad and within minutes he was drinking some kind of opaque liquid from a fishbowl. The liquid made his thinking seem very heavy, and his attention became fixed rigidly on a girl he could see through the glass partition. This wasn't normally the way he liked to do things, but maybe the liquid knew something that he didn't. He let himself stare. She wasn't saying much to the people around her, but they didn't seem very bothered. They were busy being trivial and dull. Once in a while she would answer a question reluctantly, and from the way that she shrugged her shoulders, he could see that she was a very negative person. That attracted him quite a bit, and he found himself imagining all sorts of romantic situations for the two of them--he a powerful South American despot, she his secretary; he a cruel and self-absorbed diplomat, she his secretary. He fixated for a long time on the letters he would dictate to her, trying to get them right in his mind. But she was always so critical of them...
Eventually his thoughts took him to his briefcase, as they did too often. Yes, things were going to be very great very soon.
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