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nowhere. It might have been better phrased, probably more effective, if he’d led up to it. But maybe he figured that the direct approach would catch me off balance. It did.
    Sitting down again had been a big mistake, I realized. I should have remained standing. That way I could have walked out the door as soon as I heard him—out the door, down the walkway, over the hills, anywhere but here. But now I was sitting, and getting out of the chair would take those few extra few drops of will that his words had bled out of me in the hurry. Kim didn’t add anything. He watched the reflection on the desktop, waiting for my reaction.
    “You mean you haven’t disbanded the camps?” The question was so obvious it was beside the point.
    “No, not yet.” Kim looked up at me in a curious way. “It’s way too soon for that, don’t you agree?”
    It must have been a stray note in his voice that rang the bell. That’s what he wanted; he wanted me to say yes to something—anything. Get a “yes” into the conversation, a tiny crack in the door. One single spark of assent, that’s all it took to light the fire. I’d nearly forgotten. I’d grown stale, up on a mountaintop forgetting everything I had ever learned, while he had been in this office, sharpening his technique every day. He was better than I thought, and that meant he was dangerous.
    Kim appeared relaxed, but I could sense he was wondering if he’d moved a half step too fast. That’s why he followed up when he should have stayed quiet, let the idea simmer. “The camps, as you can understand, are a very delicate problem. We did try to disband a couple, but things turned disruptive. There were too many people walking around with too many bad stories. We don’t want an increase in negative feeling toward the current regime, do we?” Hesmiled to himself, a sarcastic smile, a smile that said he could afford to be ironic on this question because he was sitting behind the polished desk and I was not. “Negative feeling—that wouldn’t be very helpful. Besides, we had experience running our own camps not so many years ago, you know. And we’ve also learned from what other people have done, as well, to get ourselves ready for this situation. Running prison camps isn’t easy; neither is getting rid of them. So much complaining! No one approves of them. No one wants to touch them. But, everybody gets their feet wet sooner or later. It’s unavoidable. The result is, there’s a large body of experience to draw from.”
    “Which means?”
    “Which means we’re improving the conditions a little at a time, retraining your guards, instituting new rules. But the camps themselves stay, for a while anyway. We figure what they need is leadership.” This time he gave himself an extra beat for pacing. “That’s you. You have the credentials, grandson of a Hero of the Republic and all that.”
    “What about the Prison Bureau? Are you going to leave those psychopaths in place?”
    “How comforting to know you never agreed with what was going on in those offices, Inspector! A little rearranging is in the works; I can tell you that much. A replacement here and there.”
    “This is the little problem you wanted me to fix?”
    He said nothing. I looked at my bowl of soup. My grandfather had made soup every morning, relentlessly, without fail. Every 6:00 A.M ., there it was, even in the heat of summer—soup. I pushed the bowl away. That’s why I was here, nothing to do with prisons. They needed my grandfather; they needed his blessing from the grave. Good luck, I thought. They weren’t going to get it, not through me.
    “I can give you the names of plenty of people who would take the job,” I said. “You need someone with the right temperament for that sort of thing. You don’t want me.”
    “Aren’t you going to ask which camp?”
    “I’m not interested.”
    “Of course, just like you were uninterested for the past fifty years in what went on inside those