are about to go wrong. I’m getting negative messages from my people: Get this done, or we pull all of it, the whole thing, off the table.” Jenö looked at the delegation leader. For the first time, I sensed that they were still on separate sides of the divide. “You’re going to lose it all. I have it right here.” He patted his jacket pocket. “The whole deal. And you’re about to see me throw it in the trash.”
The delegation leader shook his head. “You trash it, then nothing will change, you still won’t like your neighborhood, we’ll struggle back to our feet, and life will go on. Unless Mr. Sohn has given the inspector a plan he hasn’t yet revealed.”
They both turned to me.
“I’ll say it again, I’ll say it all afternoon long if you want. I’m not the person you need to deal with.”
The delegation leader put his cigar carefully into the ashtray, an oversized ceramic triangle with an abstract drawing of a fish in the center. It was spotlessly clean except for the mound of ash in the center. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Sohn sent you out here, to pass a message, I assume. You haven’t done that as far as I know.” Wrong, but never mind. “You probably think I’ve been in your way, which means Sohn didn’t tell you anything about me.” Wrong again. Sohn told me I’d be up to my ears in shit if you defected. “We both know how bad things are at home. Sometimes I sense the youngsters on my delegation can barely sit still. They’re worried about their families, they feel guilty about being here, they can’t figure out what we are doing. They’re waiting, Inspector. All day long in those talks, we sit across from people who can really help us, and what do we do? We stall, because they won’t give anything if we don’t ask, and we won’t ask because we can’t afford to look weak. What are we going to do? Make more cardboard and plywood missiles? We don’t even have enough plywood anymore. We probably don’t even have enough screws.” I heard my grandfather laugh, somewhere in the distance. “We can’t sell our way out of this. We can’t growl loud enough, or puff ourselves up big enough, but that is what we’re going to do anyway. You want to see my instructions sometime? My job is to bluff and to stall. And when that doesn’t work, I have backup instructions to stall and to bluff.”
“From what I’ve seen, you’re very good at it,” I said. “If that’s what you’re here to do, you’re doing it beyond what anyone might expect. If you ever need one, I’ll write a recommendation letter.”
“You don’t get it, do you? One week I’m supposed to make sure nothing happens. The next week I receive instructions to make progress. I keep two files—one for angry messages asking me what the hell do I think I’m doing, the other for angry messages asking me why the hell I’m not doing more.”
The ash from his cigar fell onto his trousers. As he leaned to brush it off, a shot rang out. The cushion on the back of his chair exploded. In an instant, practically before the sound died away, Jenö reached across the table, pushed the delegation leader down, shouted at me to take cover, and screamed some commands into a small radio that he pulled from his pocket—all a split second before he yanked a pistol from a holster under his jacket. Then it was over, almost as if nothing had happened, except that Jenö was breathing hard. I wasn’t breathing. I wasn’t scared or rattled, just amazed. I had yet to see cows with cowbells walking up a dainty Swiss hillside. The only travel calendars I could bring back home with good conscience had men with broken necks and people under a table by the lake. I started to get up. Jenö grabbed my arm and pushed me down. “Nobody moves,” he said, “until I say it’s okay.”
“Sure, I like it under tables with black bags.” I shook off his hand. “But if my pal here gets shot while I’m under a table, any table, I’ll never live it down in the Ministry.” I climbed to my feet and looked around. What was left of the cushion lay on the ground. It must have been hit by a tank round, judging by the hole in it. “I