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enter in the record that the terms were unfairly weighted against him and required him to affirm that he was aware of that fact before approving the agreement.
    The judge, the clerk, both lawyers, and, of course, his ex-wife had all been women. Jaeger had been the only man in the room. Sometimes, in the dark kingdom behind his eyelids, as he made love to some woman or his hand, he reentered Judge Dorrit Kierkesen’s chambers and reorganized the proceedings as the true Dionysian ceremony for which they were a metaphor. Judge Dorrit had not been bad-looking for a woman in her late fifties, nor had his own lawyer been, or his ex-wife’s, who he later learned had herself been divorced from a history professor who kept locks on the refrigerator, telephone, and television set at home, for these, he asserted, all belonged to him and not to his wife or children.
    On either side of him now at the Piet Hein table, in their regular places, sat Signe Cress, head of the legal department, slender and sharp as a knife with a tuft of curly blond locks atop her narrow head; and Holger Hansen, chief of public relations, recently recruited from a regional news service, an owl-faced man whose voice when he spoke rattled out of his sinuses. Across the table were Frederick Breathwaite, chief of international affairs, the Tank’s token foreigner, a large, bulky man who walked slowly through the headquarter hallways, speaking Danish like a broken arm; and the newly acquired spin doctor, Ib Andersen, a slender, sprightly man with glistening clean-shaven jowls and manic blue eyes. Andersen was their press spokesman—chosen for the position, Jaeger was convinced, because no one could understand much of what he said, although he spoke with intimidating emphasis and achieved successful results. Jaeger wondered if perhaps that was the secret of success: to emphatically pronounce things no one could quite understand. The CEO was good at that, too. They studied these things in their management courses. Team building and such. Went out to climb mountains together, ford rivers, paddle canoes, eat wild birds cooked over fires built without matches, and learn to mumble double-talk.
    Even sitting silently at a meeting, Andersen was his usual hectic self, guzzling coffee, chewing and clicking his trademark red ballpoint pen, shifting in his chair, folding and unfolding his arms, then suddenly sitting bolt upright and flinging the pen down onto his pad and slouching back again, refolding his arms, immediately unfolding them to pick at the corners of his eyes and inspect whatever came away on his fingertips, then, as if suddenly inspired, lunging for the thermos can to refill his coffee cup. He had a restless smart mouth, too, and Jaeger avoided him and his eyes, not to be subjected to one of his sudden epithets or rhetorical questions: Nobody likes a clever dick , he might spurt. Or, What would you say if you had something to say?
    It grieved Jaeger that he never had a response ready. His mind was usually elsewhere, often immersed to the waist in the wisps of sexual fantasy, and if he replied off the top of his head, he risked voicing inappropriate scorn and resentment. The right response always occurred to him only later, when it was too late. To Nobody likes a clever dick , he might have said, Are you saying you have no friends, Ib? To What would you say if you had something to say? he almost shot back, I’d say you have a big mouth! But that had too much surface feeling. Subtle sarcasm was called for. Like: Say to you ? Not a pin.
    Jaeger shifted his gaze to Frederick Breathwaite, doodling on his pad. Breathwaite had been there longer than any of them. He had chaired the committee that hired Jaeger and had been instrumental in his recent promotion to department head, too, beefing up his work with portfolios from his own department.
    Between Fred and Ib, directly across from Jaeger, sat Birgitte Sommer, chief of finance, an angular woman with dark curly hair