“Here’s how it is: We aren’t going to risk this company’s reputation on a structure that’s goin’a collapse before the last stone is mortared,” said a lipless engineer named Knur Anderson. “You can just telegraph your boys in Moscow and tell them we aren’t changing one centimeter of these drawings. We’ve got our building codes to mind by.”
Across the table the Soviets were conferring in mumbles too rapid for her to understand. She’d arrived aiming to improve her Russian, but her role as translator had turned out to be largely redundant, since two of the delegates spoke passable English. Now those two—Zimin and a massive-boned, tan-faced engineer named Sergey Sokolov—returned the Americans’ challenge with bored smiles. A whirring ceiling fan chopped up the silence that threatened to settle like dust over the room. The silence lasted a good eleven seconds before Florence rushed in to fill it. “Gentlemen, I’m sure we can come to an agreement that satisfies everyone.”
Sergey Sokolov rolled his eyes, presumably at her use of the bourgeois term “gentlemen.” He adjusted himself in his chair as though it were the saddle of a motorcycle. “Your codes,” he said, aiming a cynical grin at the Americans, “include many steel reinforcements we do not need. These codes were written by your steel industry kapitans to skveeze money, nothing more.”
Knur Anderson removed the lead pencil from his pocket and knocked it several times against the unshakable structure of the tabletop. “We showed you those mock-ups three weeks ago, and you said nothing. Maybe if you’d come to work a little less hung over…”
“And if we were not being cuck-holdened to make profit for steelmakers…”
“Cuckolded—now, that’s a gas!” objected Clement.
“But, then, I suppose in Soviet Russia, where you all got full employment,” Anderson continued, “anyone can show up to work half soused.”
“Everyone, let’s just focus on the matter at hand,” Florence begged. Both sides of the table ignored her.
“You’re welcome to break the contract,” Clement suggested.
Again Sokolov looked amused. “Yes, but it would be you who are breaking it.”
—
AT McKEE SHE’D BEEN given a desk with her own telephone in the personnel department, beside an unaccountably ebullient personnel director named Claude. She was waiting for Claude to leave for the day so that she could telephone Scoop in New York.
“Hear the news, Florence? Brick-road explosion near Frankfurt a few hours ago,” Claude said cheerfully.
“Awful,” she said, not listening.
“From the heat, they say. Sent a poultry truck flying twelve feet. Chicken crates everywhere.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Not for the hens that got free. You can bet it’s Independence Day for them. Say, are you going to the Independence Day Fair in Buford?”
“Still got a lot of work here, Claude. I’ll do my best.”
“Well, you have a good Fourth, now, Florence.”
“You too, Claude.”
“You bet I will.”
Once she was sure Claude had left, she dialed her boss.
“Scoop, you have a minute?”
“For you, Florie, always! How’s life on the High Plains?”
On the street below, dust-covered sweating men were mending the road.
“I’m not getting anywhere with these people, Scoop. The Soviets want to modify the blueprints. They’re claiming McKee is foisting more beams on them than they need. And now both sides are threatening to revoke the contract!”
Fumes from melted tar and hot gravel mixed in a dizzying bouquet in her head. “Goddamn it.” She tried to slam the window shut and almost severed her fingers.
“Whoa, slow down, Florence. No one is going to be revoking any contracts. The Soviets are just driving a sharp bargain.”
“But McKee’s men are saying they weren’t paid to do the job twice.”
“Forget McKee. The Soviets’ contract is with Burlington Steel in Pennsylvania. McKee is just working on commission from Burlington.”
“I don’t understand….”
“Moscow doesn’t want to order six thousand tons of steel from Burlington if they can get most of it on the cheap somewhere closer, like Germany. They promised to buy from Burlington if McKee did their plans, and Burlington is probably paying McKee extra for every foot of beam they can stick into those drawings.”
“That wasn’t in the contract…and it hardly seems fair.”
“Fair is a place where pigs win ribbons, sweetheart. The real trouble is that the Soviets have run out of money.”
“How can they run out?”
“Their grain exports have been falling. Guess they’ve had a few years of bad crops.”
None of this was easing her anxiety. “So what do you want me to do, Scoop?”
“Well, look—I’m guessing McKee can make some cuts, but they don’t want to bite the hand that’s feeding ’em. Get them to compromise a little. McKee doesn’t want to lose the whole commission.”
She felt a knot in her throat at his suggestion that she use persuasion. It was never her strong suit. She could imagine no words she could say that would get the stiff-necked men of McKee to bend. “It’s just…sometimes I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”
“You’re seeing that our Soviet friends don’t get ornery. Keep them busy. Didn’t you plan to take them to some county fair this evening?”
“Fourth of July fair. Just some local boosters trying to keep up morale.”
“Sure. Beautiful. Why don’t you go home, make yourself pretty, and then go and show our friends a slice of real American heartland?”
She hung up and let her eyes fall shut. With the window closed, she could hear Claude’s radio playing quietly on his desk. He’d forgotten to switch it off. From where she sat by the window the radio seemed to be playing two stations at once, alternating between a gabble of news voices, advertisements, foxtrot music, and static. Florence let her eyes behold the sweaty lumbar exertions of the workmen outside. Before arriving here she had never thought much about “men” as a species. But now the sight of these well-muscled Polacks and Slovenians filled her head with the echo of her mother’s injunctions about a girl living on her own “developing a taste for that kind of life.” Of course, Zelda, not being Christian, would never have called it “a taste for sin,” but burning, sulfurous sin seemed very much to be the path her own mind was veering down. She was still picturing the smirking Sergey Sokolov sitting irreverently astride his backward chair. Her brain was like the radio stuck between stations—on one frequency was the serious chanting of hard news, but turn your head a little and all you heard was seedy, sweet jazz.