Ashes of the Old World [AMW Only; ATTN:TCB]

[Amerique]

Old Riga, Gandvik
November 20, 2017
13:00 Eastern European Time (UTC+02:00)

As the cool November air tickled her face, Julie Zelenko could feel the briny salt of the Baltic Sea on her lips. A transplanted New Yorquaise, she deftly maneuvered the tidal wave kicked up by the massive tires of a passing large green truck with a graceful dodge and weave while clutching her overcoat securely with her right hand. The truck itself was a crudely-engineered relic of some Gandvian tractor factory fifty years ago whose ability to still function was a marvel of ingenuity and stubbornness in the face of logic and the corrosive qualities of cheap Gandvian steel. It was filled to the brim with huddled Gandvian soldiers, weary from the instability and conflict of the past couple years but optimistic, a chorus of patriotic hymns which spoke of a more promising future emanated from the back of the truck. Julie herself could vaguely make out some of the words.

She had witnessed the streets of Riga change before her eyes, from the grim, conservative gravitas of hardship, fear and constant surveillance a year ago to a simmering cauldron of cautious optimism, emotions that were best described as a mix of euphoria and fear of the unknown future, and you could pick up on a certain pinch of a dangerous radicalism bubbling under the surface, awaiting the right time. The etiolated and water-stained facades of some of the rundown buildings of Old Riga were festooned with various banners of the colors of the (old?) Gandvian flag arranged in simple tricolors, and emblazoned with revolutionary creedos declaring different, often conflicting idealistic visions for the mammoth Eurasian state. All claimed to be carrying the voice and authority of the local 'democratically-selected soviet' and all urged vigilance against the PPM and the return of crypto-fascism. Julie had been born to Ruthenian Slav parents in Gandvik thirty-two years prior, but any of her early memories of the country had been sparse and checkered by the grueling and dangerous journey she made with her parents, political dissidents in those days, to escape to safety in Amerique. When Julie had arrived in Riga, she knew a bare minimum of conversational Gandvian with some fluency of her native Ruthenian. During her past five years in the Foreign Service, however, posted to the embassy in Riga, she had developed fairly passable Gandvian, enough at least to talk to locals at the fresh markets and understand the signs all around her. The unease of the city's residents recently was shared by her own. Today, she made her way through the core of the city a little out of her usual way; the American embassy wanted to understand the situation in Gandvik, albeit to determine if there was a new ally to be had since the collapse of Kniephof's regime. Her low level position and as-yet seldom known presence in Riga's diplomatic neighborhood would help keep her under the radar of prying eyes as she ascertained links with Gandvian officials and established contacts with the Gandvian government. The United Republic could certainly do with more friends, and was ready and willing to foot part of the bill for the nation's recovery and leave the impression of an altruistic savior, camouflaging any strategic motives. What Baileduin, perhaps, did not fully appreciate was the situation on the ground which Zelenko and her colleagues had come to notice, that stability was only maintained by the Provisional Government for its own sake. Many competing factions sought to pull the country in their own directions, local demagogues, idealistic and opportunistic army officers alike, far-left agitators, all were scheming yet all too afraid to jeopardize the fragile system... yet.

Rounding the corner on the last street past a Victorian street lamp, she meticulously maintained her balance while crossing the cobblestone square in heels. Julie had arrived at a large building which, while the denizens of Riga afforded an importance and weight to it, appeared mostly unassuming from the outside, perhaps a hallmark of the monolithic Gandvian bureaucracy. She had an official unofficial meeting to attend to with the men deciding the foreign policy of Gandvik's future, a meeting which might impact the world to come...

[The Crooked Beat]

Riga

Never in twenty-six years of marriage had Anna-Maria Ungern von Sternberg seen her husband so profoundly and persistently unwell. That something was not quite right had been obvious from the very moment of his return from Qazan, evident in a certain paleness, initially almost imperceptible, to his complexion, a slowness in movement, a kind of lethargy which even she might have struggled to pick up on at first, if it had not been so unlike him. Matthias Joseph, normally an image of health and vigor, had taken much persuading before he would agree to visit a doctor, and this particular physician’s breezy prognosis had seemingly only served to validate Matthias Joseph in his determination to pretend that nothing was wrong. Anna-Maria, however saw through the sham straightaway. In the well-established, highly-regarded doctor, who’d made a lucrative career out of catering to the various health needs of senior civil servants and their families, she had seen a man entirely out of his depth, faced with something he had never encountered before and trying very hard to put on a show of confidence. For once, in the presence of august medical authority, she said so.

The ensuing argument had clearly left the doctor, accustomed to automatic respect and deference, quite flustered, and such was the depth of her ire that she did not manage to leave his office, an embarrassed Matthias Joseph in tow, without first exchanging some sharp words with several ladies whose station in the waiting-room had obviously enabled them to overhear every word that had been said behind the closed examining-room door. Disgusted as she was with the doctor, Anna-Maria had felt almost more so toward her husband, whose eagerness for good news she found, at that moment, little short of pathetic. Anger, of course, gave way in short order to worry as over the following days Matthias Joseph's condition grew steadily worse. Persistent phone calls to the Foreign Ministry, where despite recent reshuffling Anna-Maria could still count on a number of friends, had finally brought a doctor whose competence she judged adequate, though knowledge that her husband was finally under capable care had to be weighed against the new specialist's stunning diagnosis. Matthias Joseph, the doctor had announced with a coldness that Anna-Maria found oddly reassuring, had almost certainly been poisoned, was indeed lucky to still be alive, and was probably over the worst of it as otherwise he would have been dead already. Anna-Maria could not quite bring herself to believe it, and yet it matched exactly what she could see with her own eyes. It took a full measure of her by no means inconsiderable strength and composure to keep herself from bursting out in abject sobs at the very thought. Matthias Joseph, for his part, might have known better than to try and fool his wife by putting on a brave face. Anna-Maria could tell that the experience had shaken him just as badly as it had her, and the buoyant disposition which he tried so hard to maintain was, in honesty, above all for his own benefit. The implication, after all, when one bore down to the heart of the matter, could scarcely have been more chilling. Although the poison which he’d been slipped, which, his new doctor suspected, most likely amounted to nothing more sinister than a few milliliters of an industrial solvent, had obviously not been meant to injure him permanently, far less kill him, the very fact of the poisoning made it equally clear that the only thing which preserved Matthias Joseph from just such an outcome was his poisoner’s restraint.

That his recent near brush with death had taken place at a decidedly awkward juncture in professional terms mattered not a bit to Anna-Maria, who had long since ceased to regard her husband's steady rate of advancement through the Civil Service as anything to be celebrated or encouraged and who often wished that Matthias Joseph was more of a dullard. Her love for Matthias Joseph the Sixth Secretary whom she had met all those years ago was not, after all, in any way less than her love for Matthias Joseph the Deputy State Councilor, and for that matter she would have been perfectly happy, delighted even under present circumstances, to see him take a job driving rivets at the Nilfisk works. The fact remained, however, that Matthias Joseph, a gentle, caring, and affectionate husband, a forgiving and considerate friend, a man without a hint of violence in his heart, was also a diplomat of real ability, and Civil Servants with his gifts were too rare by far ever to escape the notice of those wily individuals who still probably came the closest to running modern Gandvik, to the extent that such a kaleidoscopic, schizophrenic, scatterbrained, anarchistic society could be governed at all. The recent dizzying succession of coup, counter-coup and quasi-revolution had left Matthias Joseph, like his boss and patron Paul Gottfried von Nesselrode-Dellingshausen, without official title, though this outward change in status did not mean his ouster from the Civil Service. Far from it, in fact. As Aarno Mäkinen, erstwhile shop steward at Stromberg Electric, wriggled into his new post as Interior Minister, he came to rely ever more closely on career bureaucrats like Matthias Joseph, and it was not by any means lost on Mäkinen that in Matthias Joseph he had an agent far more reliable and selfless than the vast majority of his colleagues.

Matthias Joseph Ungern von Sternberg, who'd incidentally taken to calling himself Matthias Sternberg in deference to the new social attitudes, had quickly been cast in the role of problem-solver-in-chief, envoy of choice in dealing with difficulties, switching between assignments for the Foreign and the Interior Ministries, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Regional Affairs Ministry with an ease that seemed to approach virtuosity. It was an array of tasks which might easily have worn down a man of normal energy entirely without the intercession of a dire illness, and to Anna-Maria's fury her husband's determination to fulfill the tasks set out for him had in no way diminished even at a time when his other faculties were diminished to put it mildly. Her husband, she had soon learned, was not the sort of man to argue. She'd all but ordered him to give it a rest, to take as much sick leave as they would give him and then find another job when it ran out, and Matthias Joseph had to all appearances agreed with her, only to dive back into his work for Mäkinen with such energy that it seemed to place his already fragile recovery in dire risk. Explicit doctor's orders setting down a program of bed rest and thin broth, obtained readily enough from the serious-minded specialist who'd taken over his case, had proved no deterrent.

Short of confinement under lock and key, an exasperated Anna-Maria could think of no way to force her husband to take the rest that he so obviously needed, and as she watched him napping on a sofa, a look of grave worry on her face, she knew that he would rise up precisely at the appointed hour no matter what she did with his alarm clock. He was, she reflected, still quite a handsome fellow at 49, tall and slender in the stereotypical Gandvian manner with sharp, aquiline features that as yet remained remarkably unaffected by age. His bright pale-blue eyes, closed just then beneath heavy lids, she could picture with perfect clarity. Matthias Joseph in his recumbent posture, half-covered by a blanket and with his hands folded vaguely mummy-like over his chest, recalled in Anna-Maria an image of Georg Anders von Ungern-Sternberg, her husband's infamous great-grandfather, photographed on his deathbed in a tent somewhere on the vast Central Asian steppe, his blood-soaked career brought finally to an end by typhus. The similarity between the photograph of Matthias Joseph's long-dead ancestor and the living man was uncanny, and with a shiver Anna-Maria realized that, but for their wardrobe, the two men might have been interchangeable. She quickly consoled herself, however, in the knowledge that any resemblance between Georg Anders, monster that he was, and Matthias Joseph ran no more than skin-deep, a thought reinforced as, right on cue, he yawned, stretched, and, with a groan, sat up on the couch to meet his wife's gaze. He smiled and she could not help smiling back, before screwing her expression back into a frown better suited to her present purpose.

"If I could do it, Matthias, I'd chain you to that couch. This very week at death's door and still not so far away, and yet here you go, back out to do those communists' bidding!"

Matthias Joseph, who adored everything about his wife and her passionate temper especially, broke into a grin which he only halfway managed to suppress.

"Please don't worry, dear. It's just a short meeting, a simple friendly chat, really. Besides, I promised Snellmann I'd keep an eye on Westermarck and Jarvinen. He's been very good to me, to us, and I owe it to him to keep my word."

Matthias Joseph rose to his feet with some difficulty, and Anna-Maria rushed over to steady him lest he lose his balance.

"It makes me so mad when you talk that way. Snellmann, what, the puppet-master? This is all supposed to part of his master plan? What a joke!" Matthias Joseph shook loose from his wife's encircling arm and went in search of his jacket, Anna-Maria following closely behind. "And those other two," she continued in an annoyed tone, "what a sorry excuse for a revolution! Can't seem to put their pants on without you or Duke Paul or General Bjorgstrom to hold their hands!"

Matthias Joseph took Anna-Maria's hands in his, which had the effect of arresting the angry outburst which seemed to have been on its way. Once again, as so often over the past days, Anna-Maria felt tears well up in her tired eyes.

"Look, Matthias, be reasonable. For the life of me I don't know why you do this to yourself. It...it isn't fair to me, the person who loves you most of all. For God's sake, Matthias..." A lump rose in Anna-Maria's throat as Matthias Joseph daubed away with his thumb a drop of water previously set to slide down her left cheek. "If you leave me alone, Matthias, I'll never forgive you."

Anna-Maria started to sob quietly as Matthias Joseph, perilously near to that point himself, put his arms around her. Just like in a song, he thought.

It was Anna-Maria's turn to wriggle free of the embrace, and, wearing a hurt expression, she turned away from him in search of something with which to stanch what threatened to become a flood of tears.

"If you're going to go, you'd better go."

Matthias Joseph, who'd never before seriously considered retirement, had over the past few days started to think about what life outside the Civil Service might actually look like. He'd never seen his wife, formerly nothing short of irrepressible, so broken down, and it made him feel more rotten than he'd felt in a very long while. Even after so many years together, the thought that someone could care so deeply about him still came as a surprise every now and again, and he knew that if he lingered, there was a good chance he would never make it out the door. With a swift movement Matthias Joseph pulled on his jacket and strode over to his wife, planting a kiss on her cheek. He then turned about and in a flash was gone outside to meet, as almost every day, the Number 7 tram.

Matthias Joseph turned Anna-Maria's words over and over in his head as wallowing, clattering Tram Number 7 wound its way down that medieval city’s haphazardly-paved streets and out over the Väinä, on the very same rails which in all likelihood carried his great-grandfather as a boy. If all of its various departments and constituent entities were tallied together, a task which, admittedly, imperfect record-keeping coupled with widespread falsification would have conspired to render almost impossible to carry out accurately, Gandvik's state bureaucracy might add up to somewhere not far shy of ten million personnel, a total certain to furnish the Civil Service with a strong claim to the title of world's largest employer. It was no coincidence that Gandvik, though until recently never to be caught applying such descriptors to itself, was so often held up as proof of the bankruptcy of socialist command economics, the nightmare scenario to which left-of-center social policies, as certain elements would encourage one to think, inevitably led. It was probably true that few if any foreigners, certainly not those from Britain or Amerique, saw much of anything in Gandvik worthy of emulation, and by the same token the average Gandvian could hold forth on their government's myriad failings, its corruption, inefficiency, opacity, its labyrinthine inner workings, its inertia and apathy, its sheer drabness, for days at a stretch. Nonetheless, it was perhaps equally true that the Gandvian state commanded almost in spite of itself a certain solid measure of popular confidence, a belief that the 'Gandvian system,' such as it was, did, at some meaningful level, work. Within the poorly-defined spaces between the bureaus and agencies something tended to operate that was not too terribly far removed from popular, consensual government. Gandvik, as many a bewildered political scientist had been forced, however reluctantly, to concede, could exhibit an almost breathtaking complexity, and to a palpable extent its tangled chains and networks of patronage and mutual obligation resembled some monumental relic from the Middle Ages.

While the Civil Service had spread its tendrils across the length and breadth of Gandvik's vast landscape in a veritable constellation of offices and warehouses, Riga remained very much the creature's master-brain, a city which since 1921 had been virtually given over to the exercise of government administration. Riga's special status had not, of course, been accepted without complaint, and arguments, not infrequently convincing, could still be heard in favor of transferring the seat of government back either to Ingermanburg, where it resided prior to Riga's elevation, or to Vitstenkyrka, that sprawling city of more than twelve million souls whose own administrative burdens did not fall far below those attending to a sovereign nation. Even if Riga were to lose de jure status as the state capital, however, a significant dispersal, to say nothing of a wholesale repudiation of its bureaucratic functions, would strike most as inconceivable. Removal of all the accumulated paper records and archives in and of itself probably amounted to a generational task, provided courage enough could be summoned to attempt such a thing in the first place.

That so substantial a portion of such a monstrous bureaucracy should have managed to cram itself within the confines of Riga’s old city, and almost entirely without recourse to new construction at that, could still strike experienced civil servants as something of a minor miracle whenever they happened to ponder the circumstance. For Matthias Joseph this meant a daily commute of enviable brevity, a short ride across the Väinä aboard the aforementioned Tram Number 7 followed by a stroll through the old town’s warren of narrow, twisting lanes, the likes of which successive mayors and city councils had categorically refused to widen for motor traffic. Matthias Joseph’s distracted mental state hardly represented an obstacle to navigation along a route which he must have covered thousands of times, along which he occasionally found himself traveling without his really having intended to. It unarguably redounded to Gandvik’s credit that the nation had never in its darkest days given in to any serious passion for megalomaniacal architecture, although this general distaste for the grand and monumental, perfectly in keeping with the stereotypical Gandvian’s Lutheranistic reserve, effectively forced major components of no fewer than fifteen ministries and five cabinet-level offices to share a set of buildings the youngest of which date from the 1920s, and most of which are a great deal older than that. Their architects, though undeniably men of admirable vision, could only have foreseen in their wildest dreams their creations’ present manner of use, and it was therefore putting it mildly to describe them as less than perfectly suitable. It was however an arrangement with which the Civil Service, all reasonable expectations to the contrary, appeared wholly satisfied, and a thorough program of rebuilding such as almost any other government might have put in motion had evidently never been afforded serious thought.

The commonest means of coping with the demands of an ever-expanding bureaucracy had been to dig underground, to the extent that structures rising two or three stories above the street might easily extend two or even three times as many levels below. These were in most cases cold, dark, musty, verminous spaces which the city’s veritable army of municipal workers had never managed to properly heat, illuminate, or ventilate, used in the main to house the tons upon tons of paper records churned out with abandon by each and every department, day after day. It mattered not that these archives were seldom if ever revisited. They were stored indefinitely nonetheless, according to a time-honored set of regulations designed above all to gurarantee a market for Gandvik’s forestry sector in the present computerized age.

Some individuals were unfortunate enough to work in that moldering underworld, or in a handful of cases preferred its easily-overlooked seclusion to a more visible setting so as to better facilitate schemes frequently of a dubious nature, plotting, for what exact purpose one could not always readily discern, amounting to a favorite pastime for bureaucrats of all save the lowliest grades. Matthias Joseph, happily for Ms. Zelenko and for his own respiratory health also, was neither obligated nor did he desire to lurk in the basements.His office, though cramped and misshapen like nearly everything in Riga’s old city, occupied in fact a particularly bright second-floor corner of the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Convent Yard, a set of buildings which, as informational plaques would have every visitor know, had been in continuous use since their construction in the 13th century. The process by which that particular piece of Church property found its way into the hands of the Gandvian state was, of course, not expanded upon, as Zelenko might well have noted.


Chances were quite good that the American embassy had gleaned enough information over the years to assemble a comprehensive set of files on men (and in the Gandvian civil service, men they inevitably were) like Matthias Joseph, the deputy ministers, the permanent, deputy, and assistant under-secretaries who made up the senior staffs of Gandvik’s roughly twenty-four State Councilors, responsible in their turn for governmental policymaking at the highest level. Anyone sufficiently brave or misguided as to take a close at Gandvik’s political scene would probably notice soon enough that orders, instructions, and policies rarely seemed to flow in an orderly top-down fashion. In light of the fact that a solid plurality of cabinet seats had always, even at the best of times, been filled by a diverse and not infrequently buffoonish collection of cronies, hacks, and nonentities, it was not always clear, or for that matter necessarily possible to determine, who was giving orders to whom. It would at any rate seem entirely sensible for a power such as the United Republic, wishing as it did to remain up to date on Gandvian happenings, to keep a close watch on all levels of Gandvik’s political monstrosity, and so therefore Zelenko undoubtedly had a good idea of what Matthias Joseph, and indeed all the slated attendees to their potentially quite important if simultaneously very much off-the-books conference, looked like.

Matthias Joseph, however, could not say the same. That women were intrusted with diplomatic responsibilities in foreign countries was a fact which, though they had no choice but to accept it, most Gandvians in government service tended to forget about, and those not frequently in contact with Julie Zelenko and other women similarly employed were inevitably surprised to meet them. Matthias Joseph himself had only the vaguest idea of who exactly he was supposed to speak with, and if under more normal circumstances Zelenko might justifiably have watched out for a tail from the Security Police, that agency, which under its still-standing (however unsteadily) director Fagerholm, had tended increasingly to specialize in intelligence-collecting of a very internal nature. There was, after all, good reason to suspect that Fagerholm would be kept around in the end, such was his usefulness, on the one hand, and the scope of his knowledge on the government’s less scrupulous activities. If nothing else, Sapo resources at that particular moment were spread far too thinly for Zelenko to attract any notice had Fagerholm intended to spy on the proceedings to begin with, which, considering the extreme precariousness of his own position, he most emphatically did not.

After disembarking at his normal tram-stop several blocks away from Convent Yard, Matthias Joseph traced the course of his commute more or less automatically, through a winding maze of narrow, largely cobbled streets. By that time of day these had ceased to be particularly crowded, as they could certainly become on either side of working hours, though he still encountered enough familiar faces among the various fellow pedestrians to lose a shocking amount of time in small-talk. The lengthier of these tended to involve expressions of concern over his state of health, for Matthias Joseph entirely looked the part of a man who’d recently been poisoned. Moreover, having managed to take his mind off of his condition for long enough to suppress a vague nausea which still lingered uncomfortably, his acquaintances’ talk of various breakfast dates and pastry-runs brought this sensation racing back to the front of his consciousness. Eventually he arrived, somewhat behind schedule, at the outer end of the short passageway which gave access to the inner Yard, around which the Ministry’s buildings, a jumble of architectural styles reflecting many centuries of varied use, was clustered, and strode through the open metal gate with no more than a cursory nod and a smile to the policemen on guard outside. These, incidentally, paid about as much attention to the young women following closely on Matthias Joseph’s heels, declining in the typically and on occasion disastrously Gandvian fashion to inquire after her business or request identification.

Matthias Joseph paused for a last breath of fresh air before he plunged into Number 4 Convent Yard’s invariably smoke-filled interior, only to find Zelenko unexpectedly at his elbow. “Please, Ma’am, allow me,” he said as he opened a tall, whitewashed paneled wooden door to let Zelenko through, and stomped up a narrow staircase to the landing which gave way to his personal office, still oblivious to Zelenko’s presence a few steps behind him. Pausing for a moment to compose himself, he turned the handle on his office door, another aged and handsome construction in oak, only to be greeted by a ferocious din. Only when he turned round to shut the door behind him, and thereby, he hoped, contain the noise, did it dawn on him that the woman who’d unexpectedly reappeared outside his office was the American representative, and a blush of embarrassment returned a shade of color to his otherwise pallid complexion.

“Ah, Madam, please accept my apologies!” offered Matthias Joseph as, stretching out a hand for Zelenko’s coat, he did his best to ignore the argument raging around him. “Please, Mrs. Halonen…MRS. HALONEN!” At that the room fell silent in a surprised acknowledgement of Matthias Joseph’s arrival, which in fairness to his secretary was nearly twenty minutes overdue. Mrs. Halonen, Matthias Joseph’s graying secretary, spluttered out an explanation as the erstwhile Deputy Minister cast a gaze of vague disapproval over the scene.

“I told them to come back later, Herr Sternberg, but they wouldn’t listen,” complained Halonen as she took in with a sweeping gesture a pair of jumpsuited individuals whose insignia marked them as technicians from Stromberg Electric. “It was all, ‘Now look here Ma’am, work order from the district office, stamped in three places,’ like it gives them the right to barge in wherever they like, whenever they like, and no sooner do they make themselves at home than these two show up.” She cast out her other arm to indicate none other than Major Ilmari Jarvinen, now technicially of the Army Reserves, and his close ally Kaija Westermarck, of whom the latter was perched subversively on the edge of Halonen’s heavy wooden desk, the former being installed in a leather armchair a pace or two away. The technicians, it appeared, had made themselves very much at home, for both held mugs of tea and one was smoking a cannabis joint, which he occasionally passed to his much older partner, with perfect nonchalance.

Matthias Joseph, who’d never met personally either of the architects of General Benckendorff’s failure at Ingermanburg, surveyed them both with an intensity which Halonen took as a sign that no further explanation for the recent noisy disorder would be sought. Jarvinen and Westermarck stared back in their turn, both requiring a moment to equate the emaciated figure before them, with its sunken eyes, drawn-in cheeks, and drooping moustache, was actually the celebrated Matthias Joseph von Ungern-Sternberg, whose exploits in Tataria had recently become the talk of the Gandvian political class, for good or ill. The two Stromberg technicians, for their part, looked on with a mixture of curiosity, vaguely perceiving that something important was afoot, and concern for the obviously unwell Deputy Minister. The uncomfortable silence, which lasted longer than Matthias Joseph normally would have let it, was at last broken, to his mild astonishment, by Westermarck, a rather short, bespectacled woman of perhaps forty with short blond hair.

“Welcome, Ms. Zelenko, I believe? Yes, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I think I can speak for Ilmari here too when I say we’re very pleased to be having this conversation at last. Like much about the current state of this country, its foreign policy is a bit up in the air at the moment, and if we’re lucky, maybe we can start to change that today.”

Iin the strictest sense, it might only have amounted to an informal, to a large extent off-the-books discussion between one very junior American diplomat, two Gandvian private citizens, and a Gandvian civil servant who had emphatically not been authorized to make offers or commitments of any sort. Then again, as Zelenko would undoubtedly appreciate, the mere fact that Westermarck had been included in the conference to begin with represented a radical departure from normal Gandvian practice. Women, traditionally, quite simply did not participate in politics, certainly not mainstream politics and radical politics seldom enough, and while people like Mrs. Halonen were a ubiquitous presence in the civil service, anyone able to conceive of a world where their responsibilities might have extended beyond making tea, taking dictation, and managing appointment-books typically kept such thoughts to themselves. And now, here was Kaija Westermarck, not just present as a part of the Gandvian side but, to all appearaces, its leader. Matthias Joseph was too confused at this unprecedented turn of events even to cringe at Westermarck’s choice of words, and kept glancing at Ilmari Jarvinen, also bespectacled though in his case still wearing his army-issue set with its thick black plastic rims, expecting him to take over at any moment.

Westermarck proceeded to introduce her compatriots, starting with Jarvinen, to their American visitor. The Major, when called forward, shuffled across the few feet of carpeted floor to shake Zelenko’s hand, simultaneously making a small bow, before promptly returning to his station on the leather sofa. Mrs. Halonen could only offer an embarrassed smile, and quickly excused herself to make tea. Matthias Joseph, when his turn arrived, also shook Zelenko’s hand warmly before moving off to hang up her coat. With Westermarck evidently leading the discussion, it occurred to him that he might do well to send the Stromberg technicians on their way, and with a twinge of regret he dug a pair of banknotes from his wallet. “Now might be a good time for lunch, gentlemen,” he said, tapping the side of his nose.

(OCC: I didn't forget about this! However, as you can see, I did get more than a little bit carried away, and I can't pretend that the result is anywhere remotely near worth the 1.5-month (eek!) wait. I've split things up into parts to aid discovery of, well, what exactly it is that's going on here, so you probably ought to skip down to part 3, which is where things actually start to happen, albeit only just!)