Read Europe at Midnight for Free Online Page B

where my predecessor had sat, in the last few minutes of the Fall, and blown his brains out after setting fire to all his files. We had managed to break down the door a minute or so after hearing the gunshot, and we had extinguished the fire without losing too many documents. The office still smelled faintly of burned paper, but I supposed it was preferable to the smell of old blood.
    The office was dark and wood-panelled and the ceiling was still stained from my predecessor’s abortive funeral pyre, but I had managed to add a homely touch by bringing in a kettle, a teapot and some cups. My Secretary and Rossiter’s Secretary could occasionally collaborate to let me have some scones if I was having an important meeting, but Lou was out of luck today.
    While she wandered about the office, sniffing at the faint smell of burning and trying to open the filing cabinets, I switched on the kettle and searched for a couple of clean cups.
    “Do you think you’d do that?” she asked.
    I looked round. There was no need to ask what she meant; she was looking at the stain on the floor.
    “That’s a hard question to answer,” I said. “He was a professional.”
    She snorted, and rightly so; it was no kind of answer. I said, “He spent all his life working in Intelligence. He worked his way up from Student to Full Professor, and there he was watching the barbarians storming the gates. He saw it was hopeless and he killed himself.”
    “You still haven’t answered the question.”
    Indeed. And if Lou was going to have any kind of career on my staff, she was going to have to learn to bite her tongue. “I have no idea if I would have done what he did,” I told her. “I can’t imagine being in that position.”
    She sniffed. “Neither could he, probably.”
    I looked at her. Rossiter had dragged her away from some reconstruction project in the East, had her come here on some shitty overcrowded overnight train so that she could present herself to me first thing in the morning. She was tired and annoyed and she needed a bath, and I was about to ask her to take on what was at best a pointless task. But I had limits, particularly first thing in the morning. I glared at her, and bless her she glared right back.
    I asked, “How long have your family been Students?”
    She shrugged. “For ever.”
    “And now you’re a Research Assistant.”
    She made a peculiar noise with her mouth that I later discovered involved sucking at a hollow tooth. She did it when something failed to impress her, or when she wanted to annoy me, or occasionally both.
    For Lou, this was a promotion, a step up in the social order, and if she was at all excited by the new course of her life she was doing an excellent job of hiding it.
    I was completely at a loss. It had taken four generations for my family to rise from Student to Research Assistant. We had then made the dizzy jump to Doctor in less than eighteen years, and had been stuck there ever since, generation after generation, an amiably unambitious family. So I was a bit bemused that Lou seemed not to care about her sudden elevation in social status.
    On the other hand, in my predecessor’s day, this office carried with it the status of Full Professor, but one of the first things I had done on being landed with the job was turn down the title. I’d tried to explain it to Rossiter, but he refused to understand. Everyone called me ‘Professor’ anyway.
    I heard the kettle boil, and I sighed. “How many sugars did you say?”
     
     
    T O GET TO the Apocrypha, you had to pass through a locked and guarded door on the ground floor of the Admin Building, then go down several flights of stairs to an anteroom where there was another guard and locked door. The guards were my idea; a lot of people wanted to get into the Apocrypha. Many of them wanted to look for the files the Old Board had kept on them. Some of them wanted to set fire to it.
    The upper cellar level of the Admin Building was one huge room,