"Come." Pak was facing the blackboard, but it was blank. Two personnel dossiers lay open on his desk. One of them was mine, with an old picture of me stapled in the corner. I had a frown on my face. I drank too much in those days, and bright lights gave me a headache. I always frowned in front of cameras, waiting for the flash.

"So, Inspector O, what have you to say for yourself?"

"Sorry?"

"How about, 'Very sorry, Chief Inspector, for acting insubordinate to your visitors.'" I couldn't see Pak's face, but I knew his eyes were closed. He was wishing he was somewhere else. "You weren't drinking that damned Finnish vodka on that hillside, were you?"

I ignored the question. "Visitors? Visitors are meek. They murmur soft compliments. Those two weren't visitors. Those were aliens. Being in the same room with them, it made my skin crawl."

"Please, Inspector." Pak finally turned around. His face was drawn in a way I'd never seen before. "We're in so much trouble I can't count that high." He looked at his watch. "And it's not even noon."

I moved over to my favorite spot, where I could look out the window.

It wasn't much of a view. In the course of a year, the courtyard below alternated between dust and mud. At one corner sat a pile of bricks meant for a sidewalk between our offices and the Operations building across the way. Years had passed, but the walk was never built. No one raised the lack of progress with the Ministry; it would have done no good. We expected the bricks to disappear, a few here, a few there, two or three taken home, a dozen showing up for sale in the street market a few blocks away. Miraculously, no one touched them, and the brick pile was transformed into a permanent monument, useless but familiar.

One summer, a junior officer in Operations had used the bricks as a bench, sitting there at dusk and singing up to a young telephone operator who worked the third-floor switchboard with her window open.