Alexandra Chen saw that they looked at her in search. That unplaceable face. All her life people had wanted to fix her features on a map, and they couldn’t. It made people clamp down on her with their eyes. They would coast a room in gaze, then halt. They were trying to figure her out.
She had on a flat gray suit and spoke in her client voice, contained and reassuring. The front of a room did not come naturally to her, but she’d practiced how to land her eyes on a small audience and let her voice settle. She had practiced how to sell a country on her selling their country.
She’d done it in Uganda and Sweden, had successes enunciating small former Soviet states still in spinout from the Cold War. Her clients wanted investors from abroad or tourists, to unravage images, firm up legitimacy. Proper trade deals. That’s where they’d arrived in history. There’s the Lisbon Strategy on one hand, and then globalization means chunks of cartography are left behind. They did not want to be left behind.
The board room had no windows. There was the woman at the head of the table who had called the firm first. There was a man with pink hands like overstuffed sandwiches. These were individuals with government posts, commercial interests, ties to the embassy. They had clean-cropped haircuts and trim shirts, professionally empty faces. But her brother had taught her poker, had taught her, “In bets, you find out who the dreamers are at the table.” And she was in the business of dreamers. She was in the business of casting bets on national narratives, then waiting for them to gain ballast.
“And can it all happen by the game?” someone leaning over the oblong of the conference table said.
She was at the whim of FIFA.
When she’d practiced her pitch with Jeremy, he’d said he’d trust her with a country. He’d trust her with anything. But her firm, Orbet, had been called late to Germany. There was only a year until the World Cup, a blip of a lead-up. Already the business security firm Orbet often worked with, Tyle, had dug up evidence of meetings between Blair’s and Schröder’s people beyond the public-private partnerships.
“Germany does not have the problem of an Estonia,” she said. “Vast demographics couldn’t picture Estonia. They couldn’t point to it on the map. Germany has an image, and German culture can be globally competitive. Yet, there is delicacy to it. What is a German brand of soft power, one that travels, invites? Rather than a German nationalism.”
“You’re referring to the Anschluss and the Sudetenland,” the man said bitterly.
“Or emotion.”
She was a student of the image. The way at a certain angle a nation caught light. She believed in second chances, third, and so on. You pieced together the tropes, then turned them. Yet she did not yet know how to tell Jeremy that the account would mean a year away.
“In public opinion polling, what we see is the intellectual history, the art is submerged beneath an identity of engineering and Volkswagen, beer gardens, efficiency. It’s ridiculous, of course. But it’s an issue of foregrounding. This is the country of Goethe and Einstein. Herzog.”
“Miss Chen,” someone making a show of his watch said. “We know whose country this is.”
They were untucking their phones from the insides of their jackets. Typing. Slapping them shut. Someone’s whisper cut into her riff. The woman at the head of the table cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Miss Chen,” she said, already standing. “But we’ll need to end this meeting. There is a matter at the Foreign Ministry.”
Alexandra collected her things. She folded the computer and turned off the projector. She’d never persisted with a man, and still, if the Germans offered a contract, she thought she and Jeremy could once a month have weekends together in the aura of Alsatian Riesling and something like holiday, that perhaps it would defend them from the ordinary rhythm of fracture. She shook the hand of the woman from the Foreign Ministry.
“Please,” the woman said, extending an arm toward the door, walking her to the exit faster.
Alexandra moved into the hallway, and out the window there was a weather that could be described as early. It wasn’t rain or shine, just a sense of open time beating down.
By the elevator, she looked at her phone.
As fast as news, she forgot how to walk. Her legs could only stand in the manner of sprinting. There was a door registered only after the rush through, stairs above and behind and below and ahead. Something cold untied in her stomach. Bombs were exploding across London.