It was habit, and everyone at the table knew it was habit, and habit was precisely the trap. Dane felt the shape of the question like a familiar glove. The cameras came up. Rick, sensing weather, began a small headshake, but the headshake arrived too late by the width of one grin.
"Second round," Dane said. "I respect — I mean, all respect, but I'm a professional in there. Second round, it gets finished. That's not disrespect, that's just — that's the job."
"An exhibition with headgear, scored on control," Tessa said.
"Second round," he said again, more firmly, because firmness had always repaired things for him before.
"And you, Ms. Lindqvist?" Tessa turned, and her voice did something decent reporters' voices do, which was to soften without going slack. "Do you have a prediction?"
Greta considered the question. She considered it the way she considered a floor before mopping it — wholly, and from the far end. She had been asked for predictions once before in her life, in Gothenburg, by younger reporters in a language she no longer spoke daily, and she had given them the answer Stefan had permitted her, which was none. But Stefan was not here to permit her, and Barlow, beside her, was very carefully not looking at her, which was its own kind of permission.
"I predict I will be standing at the end," she said. "I have some practice."
The room laughed — not at her, and that was the new thing, the thing she would think about later while she worked: not at her. It laughed the way people laugh when a true sentence arrives in a plain coat. Barlow made a sound that he disguised as a cough. Diane Kowalski, at the centre of the table, permitted herself a smile of approximately one millimetre. And Dane Whitaker, twenty-seven years old, twenty-four and three, headlining in six weeks, The Weather himself, looked down at his hands on the table and did not laugh, and did not scowl either, but sat inside the silence after her sentence like a man who has just heard a forecast he believes.
The questions moved on to the youth fund, to the contract review, to the sanctioning and the medicals, and Greta answered the few that reached her with the brevity of long practice: "Yes." "The port does good work with the money." "Three rounds is enough." She declined, twice, to be photographed holding a mop, and once, with more firmness, to be photographed holding a mop and smiling, and Tessa wrote that down too.
One question did reach further than the others. It came from a radio man at the back, young, with the particular boldness of someone who will not have to mop up after his own question. "Ms. Lindqvist — the contract review for the cleaning staff. Some people are saying that's the real fight here. That the boxing's just — the wrapping. Any comment?"
Greta looked at him for a moment. "The people who clean this building work at night," she said. "Nobody sees the work. They see only if it is not done. This is true of many jobs that hold a place up. I asked that their pay be reviewed, because a broom is not made of air and neither is a life." She paused, and something almost like dryness crossed her face. "If you wish to call that the real fight, I will not argue. But I have had one real fight already in my life, young man, twenty-one of them, and I did not lose those either. Let us keep the categories tidy." Rick Sorensen, down the table, was seen to close his eyes briefly, like a man watching a tide come in over a sandcastle he had built that morning with great care and several pages of underlining.
When it was over, and the chairs were being stacked by hands that included, after a visible internal struggle, Rick Sorensen's, Dane came down the table in the drift toward the door. He stopped by her chair. The cameras had mostly gone. What he said was not in the folder, and it showed.
"Second round," he said, quietly. "I didn't — that's just what I say. It's the gimmick. It's what they—" He stopped. "You made me sound like a—"
"I made nothing," Greta said. "I answered a question about myself. You answered one about me also, I think. That is the difference." She stood, and picked up her cardigan from the back of the chair, and her bag, which contained her cleaner's keys and a sandwich. "Eleven days, Mr. Whitaker. Train your defence. Mr. Barlow says you have begun. That is good. A man should know where his chin has been."