A woman in street clothes sat behind a desk with a modern phone bank and a not-so-modern electric typewriter. Like the clerks I’d stumbled on, she was middle-aged. But her skin was firm under a generous layer of makeup, and she’d dressed with care, if not style, in a crisp pink shirtwaist with large plastic pearls at her neck and clipped to her ears.

“You need something, honey?” she asked.

“I’d like to see Mr. Joiner. I don’t have an appointment, but it shouldn’t take more than five minutes.” I dug in my handbag for a business card and handed it to her.

She gave a little laugh. “Ooh, honey, don’t expect me to pronounce that one.”

This wasn’t a Loop office where receptionists give you a KGB-style interrogation before grudgingly agreeing to find out if Mr. So-and-so can see you. She picked up a phone and told Mr. Joiner there was a girl out here asking for him. She gave another little laugh and said she didn’t know and hung up.

“He’s back there,” she said brightly, pointing over her shoulder. “Middle door.”

Three little offices were carved into the wall behind her, each about eight feet square. The door to the first one was open and I glanced in curiously. No one was there, but an array of papers and a wall covered with production charts showed it was a working office. A little sign next to the open middle door announced it was home to “Gary Joiner, Accounting, Safety, and Personnel.” I knocked briefly and went in.

Joiner was a young man, maybe thirty years old, with sandy hair cut so short it merged with his pink skin. He was frowning over a stack of ledger printouts but looked up when I came in. His face was blotchy and he smiled at me with worried, innocent eyes.

“Thanks for taking the time to see me,” I said briskly, shaking his hand. I explained who I was. “For personal reasons—nothing to do with Xerxes—I’m trying to find two men who worked here in the early sixties.”

I pulled a slip of paper with Joey Pankowski and Steve Ferraro’s names on it from my purse and handed it to him. I had a story about why I wanted to find them, something dull about being witnesses to an accident, but I didn’t want to volunteer a reason unless he asked for it. Unlike Goebbels’s belief in the big lie, I believe in the dull lie—make your story boring enough and no one will question it.

Joiner studied the paper. “I don’t think those guys work here. We only employ a hundred and twenty people, so I’d know their names. But I’ve only been here two years, so if they go back to the sixties …”

He turned to a filing cabinet and riffled through some files. I was struck suddenly by the absence of any computer terminals, either here or elsewhere in the plant. Most personnel or accounting officers would be able to look up employees on a screen.