"Okay," he conceded, but with no sense of confidence.

"Good. The big guy here will have the truffled mushrooms on olive toast with Reggiano and rugetta as an appetizer, and the seared pork belly with scallops to follow. Bring him a beer to settle his nerves, and a very light, peppery red to have with the meal. The sommelier can choose."

"Excellent." The girl's head bobbed once as she finished the order.

Dan shifted on his chair. "Don't you feel a little, uh, odd eating you know-"

"Enemy food?" said O'Brien.

"Well, yeah."

"No," they both answered at once.

Without missing a beat, O'Brien plowed on. "Now, Dan, Jules tells me you need to look at an investment portfolio. Because of your position in the Zone, we'd have to establish it as a blind trust so there could be no question of your having profited from inside knowledge."

The former Marine Corps captain reminded Black of a hundred other women he'd met in the Multinational Force. As soon as they switched to work, they became almost robotic. Even though she was no longer dealing in war Maria O'Brien gave him the impression she would have briefed a team of fighter pilots or navy divers in the same tone of voice she was using now to review his investment options.

Truth be told, he had no real interest in his investment options. He'd only agreed to come because of Julia.

"… are no-brainers," she was saying. "Burroughs. And IBM, unless the Holocaust connection bothers you. Aerospace. GM. Ford. All of them easy picks for both wartime and postwar expansion. Then there are the less obvious, longer-term options, like pharmaceuticals, especially corporations that will be registering patents in drugs for heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and so on.

"No matter what happens with the baby Bells, you'll want a lot of exposure to telecoms. That area is going to go ballistic. I wouldn't advise putting anything into the content providers for now, though. The copyright issue is going to be twenty years getting itself sorted out, especially with so many German, Japanese, and Chinese firms holding the rights to stuff like Disney and Warners. A better bet would be intellectual properties developed by firms with no parentage in this era, especially if the IP was generated in jurisdictions which don't exist yet, and may never exist, for all we know."

Julia, he noticed, was nodding as the lawyer delivered her pitch, dropping in the occasional comment of her own. He was really surprised-by both of them, actually. They spoke like Wall Street veterans, but neither of them were what he thought of as capitalists. A reporter and a marine. You didn't think of those sort of people as having these sort of concerns. It opened another window onto the world they had come from, but even so, he wasn't sure what he was seeing. Grantville hadn't prepared him at all for this. They were talking like the mine bosses his daddy hated so much.

"Here you go." The waitress was back, delivering their first course.

Dan's plate held one large, flat black mushroom, drizzled with some kind of oil and sprinkled with spiky green leaves and shavings of a dry, pungent cheese. Julia's omelet looked just like an omelet, for which he was unexpectedly glad.

"What are you having, Maria?" he asked, glad of an opportunity to change topics. He just didn't feel comfortable talking about money. It wasn't a proper topic for the dinner table. He figured he'd agree to some sort of investment, just to keep Jules happy, and also, he thought, because they'd need a little nest egg to start a life together after the war.

"I always go for the vegetarian option," she said, clicking out of her professional personality. "It's nothing philosophical, really. I don't mind meat stocks or sauces. But when you've exhumed as many mass graves as I have, you lose your taste for T-bones."

He was sorry he asked, but she didn't seem to mind.

"And they do the most exquisite minty peas here," she added.

So that's what she was having. A big bowl of minted peas.

"Wow," said Dan. "My ma would have died a happy woman if she thought I was eating a whole bowl of peas for my dinner. She used to have to stand over me with a wooden spoon to make sure I didn't flick mine out the window."

"Try your own dish, Dan," said Julia. "It's not meat, but you'll love it. Trust me."

In fact, he didn't mind it. It was warm, and felt a bit like steak in his mouth, which, O'Brien explained, was why she didn't order it. If he thought there would be a respite from the financial conversation, though, he was wrong.

Julia had no sooner swallowed a mouthful of omelet before she started up again. "Maria, you were warning us off content providers, but I know you've got Davidson and some of your other clients hooked into that market."

The lawyer shook her head. "No. We've signed them up to an agency agreement, you know, guys like Elvis and Sinatra. And we're taking the industry-standard commission off their royalties, but where there's an extant commercial entity that could claim ownership of say, the words and music to 'Blue Suede Shoes,' we've actually sought them out, provided the product, and offered the right of first refusal. Nine times out of ten, they jump at it, and we negotiate a much better deal for the client than was the case originally, back in our world. So everyone's a winner."

"Really?" said Dan, who was only following a fraction of what she was saying.

"Well, no, not really," she admitted. "The recording companies are getting screwed, because their original contracts were so onerous. But they know a guaranteed income stream when they see it. They don't want to lose it to a competing company, which they could do, because their legal claim is tenuous at best. Nobody likes arguing jurisdictional issues, and there is no case law in Multiverse Theory. So most of the time they just sign up. And the artists do get a much better deal.

"For example, we got Sinatra out of Tommy Dorsey's band and right into his solo career. He's so grateful that he's playing four nights a week here, for free."

O'Brien spooned up a mouthful of peas, drew a breath, and started talking at a mile a minute again.

Julia looked fascinated.

Dan decided to concentrate on his dinner. He wasn't sure why he didn't like the sound of this, but it all made him feel decidedly uneasy. It seemed as if this woman was making a fortune out of thin air, but she wasn't producing anything. She was just making people pay for things that, to his way of thinking, belonged to them anyway.

"It's a lot easier when you have a single artist involved," she continued. "But it gets nightmarish very quickly when you get into things like movies, and you have hundreds of people who lay claim to be being responsible for some part of the production. And of course, you have a lot of the parent companies like MGM or Paramount operating right now. I advise my clients to stay well clear of them. There are hundreds of cases working their way through the lower bowels of the court system, and you can tell that nobody has a fucking clue about where to even begin untangling the mess. Anyway," she said, scooping up another mouthful of peas, "I always saw the entertainment industry as a sunrise initiative. Most of the opportunity has come and gone there. We're looking at medium- to long-term strategies now. Like what's going to happen in the Middle East when the war is done. I don't imagine we're going to bend over and invite the Saudis to buttfuck us again, for the next eighty years."

"So what, you're looking at alternative energy sources already, back here in nineteen forty-two?" Julia asked.

O'Brien shrugged. "I like to think of it as foresight." Then she leaned forward. "I hear there's OSS teams in Vietnam already, talking to Ho Chi Minh."

"So what are they doing there?" asked Julia in a voice Dan recognized immediately. She was at work again.