Chase: Roman

to each piece of essential equipment. Chase stood in the foyer and cleared his throat, though he was sure they had both seen him come in. The stoutest of the two women typed to the end of the page, pulled the form out of the carriage and placed it neatly in a box full of similar forms. She looked up at Chase then, and she smiled. It was an efficient smile, showing just enough teeth and turning up just far enough at the corners to be identifiable in any catalogue of human expressions. When she had held it a second or two, long enough to convey a minimum of professional courtesy and friendliness, she let it go. Her lips settled into a straight line which was neither smile nor frown but which, Chase supposed, saved a good deal of energy and kept her face as relatively free of age lines as it was.
        She said, ‘May I help you?’
        He had already decided on the tack that Judge most likely had used when he had come here researching Chase's life. He said, ‘I'm doing a family history, and I was wondering if I could be permitted to look up a few things in the city records.’
        ‘Certainly,’ the stout woman said, rising from her seat in one quick movement. The name on her deskplate was mrs onufer; her workmate, mrs klou, had not even looked up but was still battling away at her keyboard.
        Mrs Onufer came around her desk, passed the gate in the railing and motioned him to follow her. She led him to the rear of the room, through a fire door and into a large concrete-walled chamber that was ringed with filing cabinets and lined with others in ten neat parallel rows in the middle of the floor. There was a worktable with three chairs at it, the table scarred and the chairs all unpadded.
        ‘You'll see stickers on the cabinets that tell you what's inside - that section to the right is birth certificates, the one further down being bar and restaurant licences, then health department records. Against the far wall are the selective service carbons which we keep for a nominal yearly rental, beside those are the minutes and budets of City Council going back thirty-seven years. You get the idea. Each drawer is labelled according to one of two filing systems, depending on the nature of the material, either alphabetically or by date. Whatever you remove from the files must be left on this table to be returned to its proper place later. Do not attempt to replace what you pull from the files; that is my job, and I do it far more accurately than you would.’ Here she flashed a quick, economical smile. ‘You may not take anything from this room. For a nominal fee, Mrs Klou will provide copies of whatever documents interest you. If anything should be removed from this room, you will be subjected to a possible fine of five thousand dollars and two years in prison.’
        ‘Thank you for your help,’ Chase said.
        ‘And no smoking,’ she said.
        ‘Of course not.’
        She turned and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her, her tapping heels swiftly fading until he could hear nothing but his own lungs drawing in breath after breath.
        It had been that simple for Judge. Chase had hoped, irrationally, that there was some procedure whereby those who used these files were identified. Now he saw that Mrs Onufer would not be bothered with such a time-consuming routine, for she could be more than certain that no one would slip by her with stolen papers under his coat. She would notice the look of guilt as swiftly as a nasty dog notices fear in the face of a potential opponent.
        He looked up his own birth certificate, found the minutes of the council meeting in which the city fathers had voted an award in his honour. In the carbons of the selective service records, he found the pertinent facts concerning his own eligibility history, with only the confidential correspondence removed. When he felt he had passed enough time to keep from arousing Mrs Onufer's suspicions, he left the storage vaults.
        ‘Find what you were looking for?’ Mrs Onufer asked.
        ‘Yes, thank you.’
        ‘No trouble, Mr Chase,’ she said, turning back to her work.
        That stopped him. He said, ‘You know me?’
        She looked up, flashed a smile just a fraction of a second longer than her business smile and said, ‘I read the papers every evening.’
        Instead of walking to the door, he crossed to her desk. ‘If you had not known me,’ he said, ‘would you have