After what seemed like a long wait, the personnel secretary came back with Elena’s laminated identification card. The word PRACTICANT was printed in large letters at the top of the card, with her name typewritten underneath. The card had a clip glued onto the back at an angle, so it clipped neatly to her lapel.
“Mr. Meier’s assistant will be down to fetch you shortly,” the secretary said.
The assistant turned out to be a tall, middle-aged redhead with her hair drawn up into a bun even more severe than Elena’s own. She gave her name as Greta Davidek. She did not give her hand for Elena to shake. She strode into the gray corridor on long legs, and Elena hurried to catch up.
“I do not know how much information you have been given,” Miss Davidek said.
“Very little,” Elena replied.
“Your practicum will be supervised by Carl Meier.” (Why did that name sound familiar?) “Mr. Meier is the Operations Chief for the Reconciliation Department. ”
Elena’s heart sank. She knew it was not normal for a man of that rank to supervise a practicant directly. Mr. Eisenherz had obviously been meddling again.
“Mr. Meier also performs some functions of a Reconciliation Technician,” Miss Davidek continued. “Level 2. He has a long history working with this department, and he—”
“He wrote some of my textbooks!” Elena blurted. She had a sudden, vivid memory of a note at the end of a preface:
Carl Meier is a founding figure within the System of Unified Municipal Security Forces. Initially a student of philology, Meier's life took a dramatic turn with the outbreak of the Revolution. He served in the Revolutionary Army, participating in the Battle of K———burg, and thereafter applied his understanding of human dynamics to the development of internal security structures for the new republic. Theory & Practice of Basic Conversation and Theory & Practice of Escalated Conversation have become standard references for Security Force technicians in every city.
She had idly read over those words so many times. A biography like that seemed to belong to a hero of the past. She was surprised, somehow, to learn that he was still alive.
Miss Davidek ignored Elena’s outburst. “Mr. Meier was almost solely responsible for the formation of the three-level Reconciliation Process.”
Elena groped for some intelligent response. She settled on, “You say he continues to practice as a technician?”
They reached the automatic elevator. Miss Davidek pressed the “up” button. “Mr. Meier already entrusts me with a great deal of responsibility,” she said. “With the permission of Operations Chief Meier and Security Force Chief Eisenherz, I will function as acting Operations Chief for the duration of your practicum, and Mr. Meier will function as a reconciliation technician in every respect.”
The elevator doors opened and the two women stepped into the car.
Once on the twelfth floor, they walked through more corridors. Finally, they passed a door with Miss Davidek’s nameplate on it. The door just past that was Mr. Meier’s. Miss Davidek opened it without knocking.
The office was small and bare: a desk, a coatrack, a cabinet in the corner, a padded metal armchair for guests. Humble. On the desk: a blotter, a telephone—no, it was an intercom—and a heavy green glass ashtray. No in- or outbox. No pictures on the wall, only a clock.
Mr. Meier stood from behind the desk as they entered. He stepped forward, extending his hand to Elena. Not a very tall man. He had shaggy dark-blond hair, blue eyes, and a large mouth. For a moment, Elena thought there was something sinister in his smile. She suppressed the thought; it wasn’t fair to judge a man based on his looks.
His hand felt bony, but his grip was firm. “Good morning, Miss Weber,” he said. “I am pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise, Mr. Meier.”
Meier looked past her for a moment. “Miss Davidek, you may go.”
Elena glanced back to see Miss Davidek leave the room, closing the door softly behind her.
“Have a seat,” Meier said. “Now, then. According to your dossier, you are a smoker. Do you have cigarettes now?”
This wasn’t an unusual topic of small talk. Tobacco had been hard to come by lately. “Yes, sir,” she replied. “I smoke Emancipators, and I have nineteen of them with me now.” She fingered the pack in her jacket pocket.
“Those are the long cigarettes with the filters?”
The subtext of the question, Elena thought, was: Those are those cigarettes women like to smoke, aren’t they? “Yes,” she said.
“In the time it takes you to smoke two of them, I will be able to smoke three Crescents.”
An unfiltered Crescent had already materialized between his lips. He struck a match.
Elena had a Manci out in an instant. She accepted the light with gratitude. She had been craving a cigarette since stepping into the building, but no one had told her whether she was allowed to smoke.
“Your uncle does not like tobacco,” Meier said.
Elena felt an urge to sigh with annoyance. She took a sharp puff on the cigarette instead. Every conversation, no matter what, came back to Mr. Eisenherz. No one thought of her as an individual, only as a sort of appendage to the illustrious man.
She chose her words carefully, hoping to shut down the topic without saying anything overtly disrespectful. “I live in a workers’ dormitory downtown, very near here. All women. Mr. Eisenherz is not there to be annoyed by my smoke.”
A small smile formed on Meier’s lips. It broadened and broadened and then opened into speech: “This office is not bugged.”
“Excuse me?”
“You are speaking guardedly because you are afraid of who might hear you. Or of who might read the transcript. But police privilege, which you may have heard dismissed as a rumor, is real. To surveil the private office of an operations chief would create a silent scandal within the Security Force. Heads”—he smirked—“would roll.”
Elena paused for a moment, absorbing the assertion without feeling any need to consider its truth value. If she could determine his motives, that would tell her whether it was true.
She had, in fact, never heard of this so-called police privilege. That old-fashioned word, “police,” gave it an air of authenticity, as though it represented a seed of corruption that had been trapped in the Security Forces since their inception.
But that didn’t matter. If she was capable of imagining that scenario, he would have been equally capable of fabricating it.
The real question was: Would a man like this—an old soldier of the Revolution, a hero by definition, and yet still humble enough to do a technician’s work—lie? If he did lie, was it to serve his own ends? Those of Mr. Eisenherz? Or those of the People’s Republic itself?
Better to play it safe until he revealed something. She took another drag, then let the words and the smoke escape together: “I have no secrets, so it doesn’t matter who hears them.” Wait, them? That was clumsy phrasing; it could be misconstrued as hinting that she did have secrets. But to correct herself would only draw attention to the lapse.
Meier leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. He lowered his head, blocking his eyes with his cigarette-hand, forcing her to focus on his mouth. “Miss Weber, please understand something. In order to ensure that your practicum experience prepares you for the actual conditions you will be working under, you and I will, beginning tomorrow, each be assigned a desk in the open-plan office on the third floor.”
His lips were chapped. It seemed horribly intimate to notice that. Elena felt herself rolling her own lips, first the top and then the bottom, between her teeth.
Meier kept talking. “Two hundred other technicians work there. There is no privacy. They have less space than prisoners—I personally have measured this. The desk drawers do not even lock. And.” He stubbed out his cigarette and lit a second one. “Once we are situated there, we will have no reasonable excuse to return to this office. It would”—his tongue flicked between his lips—“draw attention. If we were to be seen entering this room together, you understand.”
Why even mention the possibility, then? Was he using that technique her academy instructors had been so fond of, dropping hints and broaching possibilities in an attempt to cultivate her as a future conquest? Elena felt her lips tighten. Could a man she was so prepared to admire turn out to be another pig?
When she spoke, her tone was so icy it surprised her. “Thank you for informing me about the open-plan office. I am glad to hear that I will receive an authentic and professional training experience.”
Meier looked up. He rotated the hand that held the cigarette, gazing for a moment into the smoldering tip. He met her eyes again. “Miss Weber, you miss the point. Nowhere else in the Glass House can I guarantee your privacy. If you would like to speak frankly about anything, this is your last chance.”
Miss Weber extinguished her cigarette, not by stubbing it out, but by rolling it obliquely on the ashtray until the ember broke off. With her eyes turned away from him, she looked different—less brash, less mature. He realized he had seen her before, about five years after the Revolution.
It was at Eisenherz’s home, a large city house deeded to the state by the survivors of a bourgeois family. Carl had felt obliged to attend some sort of function there—this was before he realized he didn’t need to socialize that much to protect his career. A small child was there when he arrived. She sat out of the way in a window seat, with her legs out in front of her and her hands folded in the lap of her white dress, watching the arriving dignitaries with blinkless green eyes.
Once everyone was present, Eisenherz took the child’s hand and led her to the center of the room. She sang the Revolutionary Anthem in a thin treble voice, then went upstairs with a woman while supper was served below. Carl had assumed that she was Eisenherz’s daughter and the woman was his wife; it was only later he learned the old man was unmarried. He hadn’t remembered the child again until today.
Miss Weber looked back up, her eyes fixed on his as she lit another Emancipator. The child vanished from his mind.
“Can this office be locked?” she asked.
He took his ring of keys from the desk drawer. She stood and turned to watch him lock the door, then stepped around and tried the handle herself.
“Can the intercom be disconnected?” she asked.
The cord of the intercom ran down into a floor socket near one foot of the desk. He unplugged it, wrapped the cord around the unit, and placed the whole thing in the large bottom compartment of the corner cabinet.
As soon as they resumed their seats, she leaned forward and spoke in a low and urgent tone. “I do have one thing to say. I love my uncle. But I do not believe he is living up to the ideals of the Revolution.”
Carl felt his left eyebrow lifting. He willed the rest of his face to remain still.
“To be frank,” she continued, “he is a hypocrite. He lives an indulgent life. Even his renunciations are privileged ones—do you think a real worker refuses tobacco or alcohol if he can get it? And, of course, Mr. Eisenherz is more interested in his family than in the good of the state. I decided to join the Security Force because I think it needs sincere people, people dedicated to the ideal of continuous revolution.”
Semper reformanda, Carl thought. Like a church. “I am glad you are telling me this,” he said levelly. “But why are you telling it to me?”
“Because of what I know about you.”
Carl took a draw and let the uninhaled smoke snake from his lips into his nostrils. This was a gesture designed to fascinate; it worked even on those who found it repulsive. “And what,” he said, “is that?”
“You fought in the war. Mr. Eisenherz did not. You still do humble work. Mr. Eisenherz is a lazy bureaucrat. You are voluntarily giving up authority for duty’s sake. Mr. Eisenherz will never do that”—she gulped—“until he is removed.”
She glanced at her cigarette as though she had forgotten she had it. For a few moments, she smoked greedily and did not meet his eye.
Carl lit his third Crescent and waited.
Finally she looked at him. “Mr. Meier, was that a demonstration of Level 1?”
“Hardly. You spilled so quickly I didn’t have a chance.” His mouth quirked. “You should stop drinking tap water. It makes you more suggestible, you know.”
After she left, Carl wondered why he had pressed her like that. He had no use for her secrets, although of course they were nice to have.
Yes, she was beautiful, and it felt good to have a beautiful person under one’s control. But this was not like the conversation room, where you saw the same person a few times, at long intervals, and they were worked on by plenty of others in between. She would be under him for a whole year, and that was plenty of time for her to get to know him—to learn to see through him.
At least he’d been telling her the truth when he said his office wasn’t bugged. He’d spent forty minutes checking it that morning; he’d felt the need to. If Eisenherz was willing to have him tailed to the Pine Tree, Carl wasn’t any safer close to home.
It had been a slow bad day for Jenny. She wanted to go down to one of the faukas to sing for tips—it didn’t pay well, because she didn’t sing well, but it was better than nothing. But when she went out, she found that the Pine Tree had a peace fence around it and Lotti Linberg was singing at the Old Goth. Lotti, who did sing well, bummed her a cigarette and stood her a drink. The rest of the day was listening to the radio and drinking coffee from the wall spigot and slowly eating a loaf of dried-out bread, wrenching off little pieces with tooth-hurting effort and sucking them like candy till they went away. When it got dark, she would go to the courtyard and try her luck with the men from the building.
She poked her head into the corridor to check the clock. It was almost 18:00. The sun would soon go down.
As she ducked back into her room, she heard footsteps in the stairwell. She glanced idly back out. The door at the end of the corridor opened and a man stepped out—a tall man in a camel overcoat, carrying a picnic hamper. As in a dream, when you think some improbable thing and suddenly it happens, she knew it was Bäumer and his eyes met hers.
She’d worn her red dress to wait for him yesterday. It was on its hanger now. She ran to him in her chemise.
