I looked about me. The room was entirely bare, save for the chairs and the table.

“What kind of room is this?”

“Please sit down.”

She walked out through the door and shut it.

I chose a chair and sat down.

Two gobbets of chewing tobacco on the carpet by the table, still slick.

Those men.

Here.

In this room.

I could hear computer keys clacking in the office beyond. The door must have opened. I looked up to find eyes appraising me. A bald man, dark-skinned and powerfully built, in a pressed white shirt. He crossed the floor at a brisk pace, stood facing me, a shade too close.

The door hissed shut.

“Ephraim Tvist. Chief of police.” He grasped my hand.

“Cal Curtis.”

“And you are a . . .”—he looked down into the corner as if trying to remember a complex detail, snapped his fingers—“a satirist?”

“I try to be.”

Ephraim Tvist smiled. “The world needs laughter. No?”

“Laughter is a by-product of satire,” I said. “It isn’t really the point of it.”

“So if the point is not laughter . . .”—he let go of my hand—“then what?”

“It holds people in authority to account.”

“Ah.”

He turned away, sat in one of the chairs, waited for me to join him. I sat down. He turned on a recording device, satisfied himself that it was working. His lively dark eyes came to rest on mine. “A man who uses humor as a way of dealing with the most horrific aspects of human existence. Our greatest fears. My own greatest fear is an armed man walking into my daughter’s kindergarten. I have some idea of what you must be feeling.”

I laughed.

“I wonder, Mr. Curtis, is that a satirical laughter? Or is it an angry laughter? Perhaps a satirical laughter is an angry laughter?”

“This is an interrogation room.”

A shrewd look from Tvist. “An explanation for your anger.” He looked very deliberately at my hands, then at my face, as if making an assessment. “Yes. This is an interrogation room.” He got up, opened a window blind. He turned to me and smiled. His voice was quieter now, more intimate. “The idea is that the architecture is open, and that instead of facing each other across a desk, we sit as if we are having a nice coffee, and our suspects—and I really want to stress that you are not a suspect, and that you are not being ‘interrogated’—our suspects know all this, because we explain the internal geography of the room to them. It’s all so very open and Scandinavian.”

“You provide them with chewing tobacco?”

“Worthy of satire, I’m sure. And yet they feel inclined to share their guilt.”

“So what have the Andersens told you?”

He made a noncommittal gesture. “These are early days. We are analyzing the attack cycle. They are not being cooperative.”

I laughed.