Peter Kaiser put down the phone, and pressed his desk buzzer for Karen to come back in. Karen Fortunoff was a petite, dark-eyed brunette, whose smart cream suit didn’t conceal a trim figure. She had come to Washington two years ago from Duluth, intoxicated with ambition and heady ideas about working in Congress. She had left behind her two bewildered suburban parents who still kept her room made up for her, with all her dolls and her Raggedy Andy books, and who still called her ‘Baby’ on the phone. She had worked as a secretary for a magazine printing company for a while, but then she had met a girl at a party who had helped with the catering at some of Shearson Jones’s fund-raising picnics. ‘Now, Shearson Jones is power,’ the girl had said. ‘Pure, naked, disgusting, unadulterated power.’ Karen had liked the sound of that. After all, power was the very magnet which had first drawn her to Washington. She had called Peter Kaiser the next morning.

‘Where were we?’ asked Peter, as Karen sat down with her steno pad and crossed her legs.

‘We’d gotten as far as Banking Procedures (ii),’ she said.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Peter. ‘Banking Procedures (ii). How to pay in corporate cheques, and the clearance of charitable funds.’

Karen said, ‘Don’t you ever take a break?’

Peter’s hands were clasped in front of his mouth, his elbows propped on his desk. He looked up at her, his eyes refocusing slowly, as if he were tired, or drugged.

‘A break?’ he asked, as if he didn’t know what the word meant.

‘Yes. Don’t you ever relax?’

‘Karen,’ he said, ‘we’re on Banking Procedures (ii). If you want to talk about relaxation, you’ll have to do it in your own time.’

‘You’re not that much of a machine, surely.’

‘I’m busy. I have fifty-five other things to do before we close down for the night. That’s all. It’s nothing to do with being a machine.’

‘Don’t you even drink coffee?’

Peter sat back in his revolving leather armchair, but his fingers still tensely gripped the edge of his desk.

‘Karen,’ he said, ‘are we going to finish this dictation or not?’

‘I only asked you a question out of human consideration,’ she told him. ‘You work with people, you want to know what they’re like, what makes them tick. Well, I do, anyway.’

‘What makes me tick is irrelevant to Banking Procedures (ii). It is also none of your business.’

‘All right. I didn’t mean to be offensive. I simply said that—’

Peter pressed the buzzer on his desk. Almost immediately, the door opened, and Fran Kelly, Karen’s own assistant, stepped in.

‘Mr Kaiser?’

‘Bring a steno pad and a sharp pencil. We have two hours of dictation to do.’

Karen sat up straight. ‘What goes on here? Just because I asked you a simple personal question—’